Edinburgh Napier University will collaborate with partners at Glasgow Caledonian and NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde
Researchers at Edinburgh Napier University (ENU) and Glasgow Caledonian University (GCU) have secured funding through Scotland Beyond Net Zero (SBNZ) for a collaborative project to address sustainability challenges across the healthcare sector.
Led by Professor Berk Canberk of ENU, together with Dr Lina Khaddour, Professor Bernardino D’Amico, and Dr Kubra Duran, and GCU’s Dr George Loumakis and Professor Rohinton Emmanuel, along with PhD student, Shefali Chauhan, the project is being delivered in partnership with NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde (NHSGGC) as an external collaborator.
The project builds on the growing collaboration between Glasgow Caledonian's Healthcare Built Environment Doctoral Academy and Edinburgh Napier University's Scottish Healthcare Built Environment Network (SHBEN), bringing together expertise to support more sustainable and climate-resilient healthcare estates with the aid of digital twins.
The research will explore how digital twin technology can support the sustainable management of healthcare estates by creating virtual representations of hospital assets using operational, energy and environmental data.
Focusing on Scotland's largest health board, which serves around 1.3 million people across 23 hospitals, nine acute sites and more than 70 health centres and clinics, the project aims to develop a framework that can assess the potential impact of renewable energy technologies, decarbonisation measures and climate adaptation interventions.
The work supports the ambitions of the NHS Scotland Climate Emergency and Sustainability Strategy by providing evidence-based recommendations to support future decision-making. The researchers also hope the approach could provide a scalable model that could be adapted by other Scottish health boards working towards net zero.
Professor Berk Canberk, Head of Cyber Security & Systems Engineering at ENU, said: “This is an exciting opportunity for us to explore ways to make healthcare facilities more sustainable and meet our climate change targets using our unique digital twin research.
“By building a real-time replica of a hospital estate as digital twins, we can test the effects of changing energy consumption and hopefully provide a model that can be replicated elsewhere.
“We are looking forward to collaborating with our partners in this project and utilising Edinburgh Napier University’s strength in digital twin technology.”
This project is one of 14 initiatives funded through the latest Scotland Beyond Net Zero seed funding round, supporting collaborative research that addresses challenges including sustainable healthcare, climate resilience and the transition to a low-carbon economy. You can read more about them here.