The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the world. Today, the use of information and communications technology (ICT) in support of education, medicine, business, and administration has become a reality practically everywhere. In particular, the eHealth (digital Health) sector is on the cusp of a revolution, fueled by the worldwide health emergency due to the spread of the new coronavirus. With a view to developing new sixth-generation (6G)-oriented architectures, advanced eHealth services like telemonitoring would benefit from the support of technologies that guarantee secure data access, ultralow latency and very-high reliability targets, which are hardly achievable by the fifth generation (5G). This is the reason why this work proposes an eHealth system architecture, in which low-latency enabling technologies like Device-to-Device (D2D) communications and multiaccess edge computing (MEC) are integrated and supported by security mechanisms for an optimal management of sensitive health data collected by Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) devices. A preliminary evaluation of the proposed framework is provided that shows promising results in terms of data security and latency reduction.

The pandemic caused by COVID-19 has shed light on the urgency of bridging the digital divide to guarantee equity in the fruition of different services by all citizens. The inability to access the digital world may be due to a lack of network infrastructure, which we refer to as service-delivery divide, or to the physical conditions, handicaps, age, or digital illiteracy of the citizens, that is mentioned as service-fruition divide. In this paper, we discuss the way how future sixth-generation (6G) systems can remedy actual limitations in the realization of a truly digital world. Hence, we introduce the key technologies for bridging the digital gap and show how they can work in two use cases of particular importance, namely eHealth and education, where digital inequalities have been dramatically augmented by the pandemic. Finally, considerations about the socio-economical impacts of future 6G solutions are drawn.

Over the past two years, the spread of COVID-19 has spurred the use of information and communication technologies (ICT) in aid of healthcare. The need to guarantee continuity to care has promoted research and industry activities aimed at developing solutions for the digitalization of the procedures to be performed to provide health services, even in emergency scenarios. Digital collection, transmission, and processing of health data represent the starting point for fulfilling this innovation process but also bring heterogeneous challenges. These motivations led to the elaboration of this work, which analyzes innovative and technological tools for the development of digital health (eHealth) through the collection of multisectoral literature, produced thanks to the cooperation of varied research groups, thus providing a multidisciplinary survey. Since digital health is expected to be one of the leading applications of the sixth-generation (6G) wireless cellular networks, this paper covers the related telecommunications aspects. Furthermore, the exploitation of artificial intelligence paradigms to elaborate massive amounts of biological data is examined. Given the extreme sensitivity of health data, this paper also investigates security and privacy issues. In particular, the main techniques and approaches to guarantee security properties (i.e., anonymity, responsibility, authentication, confidentiality, integrity, non-repudiation, and revocability) are studied. Applications involving innovative electromagnetic systems for healthcare and assisted living services are described to provide an example of an eHealth scenario leveraging ICT. Finally, the telemedicine-related regulations of the European Commission are analyzed, with particular reference to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

As the deployment of fifth-generation (5G) cellular networks progresses worldwide, researchers are already delving into the potential of sixth-generation (6G) systems. One promising 6G-focused solution that has garnered significant attention of both researchers and healthcare providers is the integration of the digital twin (DT) paradigm with the digital health (eHealth) sector. This paper examines this solution, highlighting the challenges that must be overcome to fully unlock its potential, particularly in managing patient mobility. Specifically, the following contributions are provided. First, we explore the value of the deployment of DTs in eHealth, reviewing global initiatives, standards, potential applications, challenges, and 6G-enabled solutions. Next, we focus on the placement of medical DTs at the network’s edge and their migration in response to patient mobility. Finally, we present findings from a simulation campaign, showing key insights into the trade-offs involved in medical data transfer strategies. These results deepen our understanding of DT migration complexities and highlight the transformative impacts that mobility-driven medical DTs could have on healthcare services and patient outcomes.

Following the COVID-19 outbreak, the health sector is undergoing a deep transformation that is increasingly pushing it towards the exploitation of technology, thus fostering the growth of digital health (eHealth). Cellular networks play a pivotal role in promoting the digitalization of healthcare, and researchers are banking on beyond fifth-generation (B5G) and sixth-generation (6G) technologies to reach the turning point, given that, according to forecasts, 5G will not be able to meet future expectations. Security is an aspect that definitely should not be overlooked for the success of eHealth to occur. This work aims to address the security issue from a poorly explored viewpoint, namely that of economics. In this paper, we first describe the main eHealth services, highlighting the key stakeholders involved. Then, we discuss how next-generation technologies could support these services to identify possible business relationships and, therefore, to realize an innovative business-oriented security analysis. A qualitative assessment of the impact of specific security breaches in diverse business conditions is provided. Moreover, we examine a case study in order to show the effects of security attacks in a definite scenario and discuss their impact on business dynamics.

The growing interest in precision agriculture has led, in recent years, to an increase in the adoption of Internet of Things (IoT) technologies in the service of smart agriculture to optimize agricultural production processes through the monitoring of environmental conditions and prevent food loss. This work stems from research conducted as part of the Tech4You project, where the enabling digital technologies developed in Spoke 6 contribute to the advanced solutions envisaged by Spoke 3 to facilitate the transition to a sustainable agrifood system. In particular, we present the design and evaluation of a multi-hop Device-to-Device (D2D) communication architecture that leverages Long Range (LoRa) technology, specifically designed for monitoring vineyards in the context of passito wine production. The proposed framework addresses the challenge of monitoring mobile containers for grapes during the drying phase, a critical stage in which inadequate temperatures and humidity can promote the growth of fungi and the formation of mycotoxins. The integration of simulation-based performance evaluation with a multi-layer system architecture is presented in this work. The objective is to compare the performance of different routing strategies in choosing data forwarding paths to the gateway. The simulation results show that the proposed routing strategy, which is based on learning but also focuses on energy consumption, offers good performance. In particular, it achieves packet delivery rates of over $92\%$ and preserves over $95\%$ of active nodes after 2 h of operation. Energy-aware routing strategies also perform well compared to those that only consider the distance from the destination, but overall, the proposed strategy achieves a better trade-off on the metrics analyzed.