ABSTRACT
Digital twins are an emerging technology that has the potential to transform healthcare as we know it. A concept derived from engineering, digital twins have disrupted many industries. By modeling the physical entity with high fidelity and enabling a bi-directional information transfer between physical and virtual worlds, digital twins are instrumental in understanding and analyzing the current state and predicting the future state of the object or system they represent. Creating digital twin applications in healthcare is challenging compared to other disciplines because of the inter-individual variability in genetics, physiology, lifestyle, and environment, leading to variability in phenotypes. However, the same challenges that complicate digital twin development in healthcare also make the job of physicians challenging. Predictive tools that account for inter-individual variability could provide better future health risk assessments for timely interventions, leading to better outcomes for patients. In this chapter, we explore the role of digital twins in healthcare and provide a view of the current landscape of healthcare digital twin applications. Digital twins can be categorized based on the target the twins represent, and by the enabling modeling technology. Though the use of digital twin technology holds great promise in transforming healthcare, a wide range of ethical, technical, and philosophical challenges need to be addressed to realize the power of digital twins. We discuss a few of the challenges and share a vision of a digital twin–powered future wherein healthcare is more proactive than reactive.
