Abstract
Emerging technologies such as digital twins, blockchain, Internet of Things (IoT), and Artificial Intelligence (AI) play a vital role in driving the industrial revolution in all domains, including the healthcare sector. As a result of COVID-19 pandemic outbreak, there is a significant need for medical cyber-physical systems to adopt these emerging technologies to combat COVID-19 paramedic crisis. Also, acquiring secure real-time data exchange and analysis across multiple participants is essential to support the efforts against COVID-19. Therefore, we have introduced a blockchain-based collaborative digital twins framework for decentralized epidemic alerting to combat COVID-19 and any future pandemics. The framework has been proposed to bring together the existing advanced technologies (i.e., blockchain, digital twins, and AI) and then provide a solution to decentralize epidemic alerting to combat COVID-19 outbreaks. Also, we have described how the conceptual framework can be applied in the decentralized COVID-19 pandemic alerting use case.