Industry 4.0 encompasses a promise of a new industrial revolution in terms of providing secure, intelligent, autonomous and self-adaptive industrial IoT (IIoT) networks. Key industrial applications and systems will be significantly more complex due to the involvement of the vast number of different devices and diverse nature of various stakeholders and service providers. These complex industrial processes, services and applications also have strict requirements in terms of performance-latency in particular-and resource-efficiency, together with high standards for security and trust. In this context, Blockchain and Edge Computing emerge as prominent technologies to address the mentioned essential requirements and to further strengthen the rise of the new era of digitization. The Edge computing paradigm ensures low latency services for IIoT applications while optimizing the network usage, whereas Blockchain provides a decentralized way for ensuring data integrity, trust and security. In this paper, we propose a 'BlockEdge' framework that combines these two enabling technologies to address some of the critical issues faced by the current IIoT networks. We verify the feasibility of our approach by evaluating the performance and resource-efficiency of BlockEdge in terms of latency, power consumption and network usage, through simulations against non-Blockchain solution.

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The rapid evolution of technology allows the healthcare sector to adopt intelligent, context-aware, secure, and ubiquitous healthcare services. Together with the global trend of an aging population, it has become highly important to propose value-creating, yet cost-efficient digital solutions for healthcare systems. These solutions should provide effective means of healthcare services in both the hospital and home care scenarios. In this paper, we focused on the latter case, where the goal was to provide easy-to-use, reliable, and secure remote monitoring and aid for elderly persons at their home. We proposed a framework to integrate the capabilities of edge computing and blockchain technology to address some of the key requirements of smart remote healthcare systems, such as long operating times, low cost, resilience to network problems, security, and trust in highly dynamic network conditions. In order to assess the feasibility of our approach, we evaluated the performance of our framework in terms of latency, power consumption, network utilization, and computational load, compared to a scenario where no blockchain was used.

According to World Health Organization (WHO), the worldwide prevalence of chronic diseases increases fast and new threats, such as Covid-19 pandemic, continue to emerge, while the aging population continues decaying the dependency ratio. These challenges will cause a huge pressure on the efficacy and cost-efficiency of healthcare systems worldwide. Thanks to the emerging technologies, such as novel medical imaging and monitoring instrumentation, and Internet of Medical Things (IoMT), more accurate and versatile patient data than ever is available for medical use. To transform the technology advancements into better outcome and improved efficiency of healthcare, seamless interoperation of the underlying key technologies needs to be ensured. Novel IoT and communication technologies, edge computing and virtualization have a major role in this transformation. In this article, we explore the combined use of these technologies for managing complex tasks of connecting patients, personnel, hospital systems, electronic health records and medical instrumentation. We summarize our joint effort of four recent scientific articles that together demonstrate the potential of the edge-cloud continuum as the base approach for providing efficient and secure distributed e-health and e-welfare services. Finally, we provide an outlook for future research needs.