Leveraging digital twin for COVID-19 risk assessment in IoT-enhanced hospital pharmacies

Over the past three years, the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has caused widespread human casualties, economic disruptions, and public health challenges. It is vital to assess the risk of contagious airborne diseases like COVID-19 to safeguard public health. Hospitals, as potential hotspots due to patient presence, require meticulous risk evaluation, particularly in critical areas such as pharmacies, which witness significant foot traffic for medicine collection. This paper presents a Digital Twin (DT) enabled (Internet of Things) IoT-based architecture comprising different enablers and their data interactions for COVID-19 Digital Twin-Risk Assessment in hospital pharmacy (DT-RAHP) to capture dynamic risk variations. The Decision Intelligence Module in the proposed architecture employs a novel two-phase risk assessment approach, DT-RAHP, which includes: Risk Assessment in Hospital Pharmacy - Phase I (RAHP-I) assesses the risk based on the primary risk factors, whereas the second phase, Risk Assessment in Hospital Pharmacy - Phase II (RAHP-II), extrapolates the risk assessment based on the secondary risk factors. Using DT, the system gathers data, assesses risk, and provides alerts. Studies in two hospital pharmacies showcased efficient sub-region classification based on the risk assessment. Additionally, our study employs hierarchical clustering techniques to categorize risk dynamically, ensuring a scalable and efficient assessment model. The DT-RAHP mobile application further enhances risk communication by disseminating warnings to users and officials when the risk is high. This proactive risk management framework offers a robust methodology applicable to various airborne contagious diseases. Moreover, the flexibility of the methodology allows for incorporating additional risk factors, enhancing result precision and comprehensiveness. • DT enabled IoT and ML-based COVID-19 dynamic risk assessment architecture. • Two-phase dynamic COVID-19 risk assessment model with primary and secondary risk factors. • Mobile application for giving alerts and disseminating warnings.