VITALITY

The project

VITALITY – Innovation, digitalisation and sustainability for the diffused economy in Central Italy is one of the eleven Innovation Ecosystems funded by the Italian Ministry of University and Research under the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR, Mission 4, Component 2, Investment 1.5, NextGenerationEU). Coordinated by Fondazione Vitality (the Hub, based in L'Aquila) and structured as a Hub & Spoke network, it brings together nine universities of Abruzzo, Marche and Umbria running ten thematic Spokes, together with public and private affiliated entities. Its mission is to valorise research results, foster technology transfer and accelerate the digital and sustainable transformation of local production systems, largely made of SMEs, across three macro-areas: Health, Science and Living Environments, and Engineering & ICT (aerospace, cybersecurity, smart communities, materials).

The University of L'Aquila leads Spoke 1 "MEGALITHIC – Methods and technologies enhancing local specialisation strategies in Health, Industry and Cybersecurity".

Our role

NSLab led five activity lines of Spoke 1:

• M9 – Wearable, Ambient Assisted Living and processing technologies for health big data. An integrated model of wearable, AAL and edge-cloud big-data technologies for active health, brought from prototype to operational service in territorial healthcare (smart-shirt remote monitoring through general practitioners, with ASL Teramo and the Italian Red Cross), occupational safety (field trials with more than 1,180 hours of recordings on 43 users) and defence (4G/5G-enabled wearable control unit interfaced with a command-and-control system, with AI anomaly detection).
• M16 – Cybersecurity advising. Training tools and methodologies to raise cybersecurity awareness in large companies and SMEs: a unified framework for cyber crisis management and cyber exercises, LLM-generated realistic training scenarios, and hardware-accelerated DDoS mitigation on NVIDIA BlueField DPUs at up to 100 Gbps.
• M17 – Cybersecurity for IoT. An O-RAN + SIEM security framework for IoT-supporting 5G/6G networks with xApps for real-time anomaly detection, physical-layer attack identification and DDoS mitigation; deep-learning intrusion detection for IIoT/OT; hierarchical key management for IoT; a test-before-invest infrastructure for local SMEs.
• M18 – Cybersecurity for Aerospace. Post-quantum identity-based encryption for aerospace communications, two-tier Urban Air Mobility communication architectures with THz airborne backhaul, 6G network slicing for UAM with sub-2 ms command-and-control latency, and dedicated training (CyberChallenge.IT@UnivAQ).
• M19 – Cybersecurity for Automotive. A SIEM-based Security Operations Center for connected vehicles with real-time CAN-bus monitoring, lightweight and federated intrusion detection for in-vehicle networks, multi-connectivity for massive URLLC in emergency-vehicle scenarios and secure dynamic route planning.

Facts

• Programme: PNRR Mission 4 Component 2 Investment 1.5 "Innovation Ecosystems", MUR, funded by the European Union – NextGenerationEU (ECS_00000041).
• Duration: January 2023 – April 2026.
• Hub: Fondazione Vitality (President Fabio Graziosi). Spoke 1 affiliates: University of Teramo, University of Macerata, University of Molise, Dompé farmaceutici, Italian Red Cross.
• Budget: ecosystem grant about € 116 M; Spoke 1 about € 17.3 M, of which University of L'Aquila € 13.9 M.
• NSLab leads of the activity lines: Andrea Marotta (M16–M19), Fabio Graziosi (M9).
• Website: fondazionevitality.it – Spoke 1