Model-based digital twins of medicine dispensers for healthcare IoT applications

Abstract

Healthcare applications with the Internet of Things (IoT) are oftensafety-critical, thus, require extensive testing. Such applications are often con-nected to smart medical devices from various vendors. System-level testing ofsuch applications requires test infrastructures physically integrating medicaldevices, which is time and monetary-wise expensive. Moreover, applicationscontinuously evolve, for example, introducing new devices and users andupdating software. Nevertheless, a test infrastructure enabling testing with afew devices is insufficient for testing healthcare IoT systems, hence compro-mising their dependability. In this paper, we propose a model-based approachfor the creation and operation of digital twins (DTs) of medicine dispensers as areplacement for physical devices to support the automated testing of IoT appli-cations at scale. We evaluate our approach with an industrial IoT system withmedicine dispensers in the context of Oslo City and its industrial partners, pro-viding healthcare services to its residents. We study the fidelity of DTs in termsof their functional similarities with their physical counterparts: medicine dis-pensers. Results show that the DTs behave more than 92% similar to the physicalmedicine dispensers, providing a faithful replacement for the dispenser.