IoT and Digital Twin for Monitoring and Simulating Living Spaces Scenarios

The Internet of Things (IoT) and Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) are being integrated into living spaces to collect data and to perform monitoring and control operations which are supposed to make environments more efficient, secure, and comfortable for their inhabitants. Recently, the Digital Twin concept has attracted considerable attention from industry and academia. Digital Twins build upon CPS and are empowered by IoT data to achieve a dynamic and interactive representation of physical systems. Digital Twins of living spaces promise to support the monitoring, simulation and prediction of scenarios occurring in such environments, which could guide decision-making that impact both the environments and their inhabitants. This chapter reports on the combination of IoT and the Digital Twin for monitoring and simulation of living spaces to enhance the well-being and safety of inhabitants. It focuses on illustrating the hardware and software characteristics of IoT devices deployed in a living space, together with a Digital Twin platform used to monitor living spaces, and to design and simulate life scenarios. An application of such IoT devices and Digital Twin platform is also presented in a use case targeting a public university to simulate IoT system and people behaviors in case of an earthquake scenario.