Digital Twins Environment Simulation for Testing Healthcare IoT Applications

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Healthcare applications using the Internet of Things (IoT) architecture are connected with various medical devices designed to serve patients. Rigorous system testing of health care IoT applications requires integrating multiple medical devices to ensure the dependability of these applications. The integration of numerous physical medical devices with varying versions is a costly and time-consuming process. In this regard, our previous work introduced the concept of employing digital twins (DTs) as substitutes for physical devices for testing purposes. Specifically, we presented a model-based approach to generate DTs of medicine dispensers. The evaluation of our approach with a Karie medicine dispenser demonstrated 92% fidelity of Karie DTs. From our experiences, we observed that the real operating environment of medical devices involves several non-deterministic factors, essential for DTs to reflect devices' behavior precisely. Therefore, we plan to devise a methodology to model and simulate the environment of medical devices DTs, taking into account environmental uncertainties. We intend to empirically evaluate our methodology in the real-world context to analyze the simulation of behavioral models of the environment and uncertain events generated for DTs.