Digital Twins in Healthcare: an architectural proposal and its application in a social distancing case study

The digital transformation process fostered by the development of Industry 4.0 technologies has largely affected the health sector, increasing diagnostic capabilities and improving drug effectiveness and treatment delivery. The Digital Twin (DT) technology, based on the virtualization of physical as...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE journal of biomedical and health informatics 2023-10, Vol.27 (10), p.1-12
Main Authors: De Benedictis, Alessandra, Mazzocca, Nicola, Somma, Alessandra, Strigaro, Carmine
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Case studies
COVID-19
Data exchange
Digital Public Health
Digital Twin
Digital twins
Disease control
Diseases
Genetic transformation
Health care
Heart
Human factors
Industrial applications
Industrial development
Industry 4.0
Literature reviews
Medical services
Optimization
Pandemics
Public health
Social distancing
Social factors
Surgery
Technology
Telemedicine
Viruses
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Summary:The digital transformation process fostered by the development of Industry 4.0 technologies has largely affected the health sector, increasing diagnostic capabilities and improving drug effectiveness and treatment delivery. The Digital Twin (DT) technology, based on the virtualization of physical assets/processes and on a bidirectional communication between the digital and physical space for data exchange, is considered a game changer in modern health systems. Digital Twin applications in healthcare are various, ranging from virtualization of hospitals' physical spaces/organizational processes to individuals' physiological/genetic/lifestyle characteristics replication, and include the modeling of public health-related processes for monitoring, optimization and planning purposes. In this paper, motivated by the current COVID-19 pandemic, we focus on the application of the Digital Twin technology for virus containment on the workplace through social distancing. The contribution of this paper is three-fold: i) we review the existing literature on the adoption of the Digital Twin technology in the healthcare domain, and propose a classification of DT applications into four categories; ii) we propose a generalized Digital Twin architecture that can be used as reference to identify the main functional components of a Digital Twin system; iii) we present CanTwin, a real-life industrial case study developed by Hitachi and representing the Digital Twin of a canteen service serving 1100 workers, set up for social distancing monitoring, queue inspection, people counting and tracking, table occupancy supervision.
ISSN:2168-2194
2168-2208
DOI:10.1109/JBHI.2022.3205506