Latest advancements in the healthcare industry have made patients monitoring quire easy. However, there are numerous factors to consider while accessing the health of an individual. At present, patient-worn sensors like Apple watch or Fitbit are helping researchers to gather the patient data. Then, this data is employed to form the digital twin of their baseline health information.
What is Digital Twin
Digital twin is similar to forming a backup of patient’s physical state prior to taking them for any medical procedure, explained Dr. Mohamed Rehman from Johns Hopkins All Children’s Hospital. He is planned to conduct a session on March 11, 2020 at HIMSS20. In this session, he will offer detailed guidance on the digital twin concept. Generally, the digital twin works as a guideline for the healthcare providers. It helps them to monitor and evaluate if the patient is recovering from the medical procedure as per the expectation.
How Digital Twin Can Help In Patient Monitoring
Current data sensors allow to gather information on an individual’s various aspects such as steps, sleep hours, and heart rate. This data lets the healthcare providers to monitor the patients on many parts during their recovery after medical procedure. Moreover, Dr. Rehman envisions that this technique will offer greater outcomes in the forthcoming period. He stated, “Once developed, we can use the digital twin as an individual’s metric for improvement.” Moreover, digital twin can empower in finding out anomalies in an individual, he stated. This data can help in foretelling the health impacts of anomalies on individuals.
Dr. Rehman stated that the system keeping the track of all deviances from the standard routine can help to trace out the problems in more correct manner. Furthermore, the metrics such as time spent by an individual on the social media can give a valuable insight about their health, he added. These insights from a digital twin are real-time and more accurate. They assist healthcare providers to provide more targeted and exact care needed.