Why is digital twin technology coming to our body

Soon, we may all have live digital representations of our bodies, tracking, measuring, and tracking our movements, activities, and key health indicators of health, fitness, and wellness.

It’s already happening.

My smart ring measures body temperature, heart rate, activity, sleep. My smartwatch monitors activity, exercise, blood pressure, blood oxygen. My phone knows how many steps I’ve taken, and if changes in my pace indicate the onset of Parkinson’s disease. A small, home-based spectrometer can tell you how your blood sugar or cholesterol levels respond to different foods. Soon you will know why my shoes hurt my achilles, what is effective about my stride, how high I jump, and whether walking, running or jumping dangerously selects one part of my body.

“I believe we’re moving very quickly into this personal health, wellness, fitness, performance,” Plantiga CEO Quinn Sandler said on the TechFirst podcast.

“I think this idea of ​​comparing one person to another is an antiquated way of looking at everything. What we feel is happening here and where we are going is actually building infrastructures to monitor the complexity of human activity and develop insights and recommendations and interventions based on their goals – I think with someone who can. Loop – to actually produce better results. Again, that’s performance, or recovery, or injury prevention.

Chinese AI passed the country’s national medical licensing exam five years ago and is helping doctors deliver healthcare faster and cheaper in a country of 1.4 billion people with just 3.8 million doctors.

That doesn’t mean you or I want to see a virtual AI doctor on our next visit: it’s still early days. This means that technology will have an even greater impact on the monitoring and delivery of healthcare in the future.

And let’s be honest: it’s much, much needed.

One thing is clear, there are many devices that collect data from our bodies. Plantiga offers a smart sole that adapts to your shoe and measures 150 different parameters, Sandler says, about how we walk, jump, turn, turn and more. Developed by its CEO’s late father (also a co-founder of the company), Norman, an AI “digital exercise coach,” Planga launched in the world of high-performance athletes.

One user: Olympic gold medalist Andre de Grasse, Olympic champion in the 200m and recent 4x100m gold medalist at the 2022 World Championships.

But the data on your performance is more than the Olympians. It is also for the elderly.

“Ultimately our goal is to take the power of analyzing people’s behavior to drive better results,” Sandler says. “This is someone my mom’s age, an athlete with neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s, or recovering from an ACL or hip injury. The way we move says a lot about our health.

And that health is getting harder to deliver.

Whether it’s high costs in the US or overcrowded national medical systems in Canada or the UK, it’s harder and harder to get care for people who need it.

There is a role for technology here if we frame it well.

I came down with covid after traveling home from Mexico. I called the health line at BC and asked my breathing rate and how it changed from normal, my body temperature, heart rate and other information. The nurse who helped me said yes, it’s covid, no, it wasn’t too serious, and yes, I could stay home safely and be healthy.

In a world where nearly 25% of Americans cannot afford medical care and half the world’s population lacks essential health services, how else do we provide at least some level of care? Doctors certainly can’t do it alone: ​​we don’t have enough to begin with, and we’re literally overwhelmed by the amount of patient health data we have now.

What we have now is data from a small number of people wearing devices that measure and monitor health markers. What we don’t yet have is a way to easily share that data in a secure and private way, or to expand the spectrum of people who can afford the devices.

That may come.

Some think we’ll have digital twins of the human body by the end of the decade. Scientists are building conceptual models, and the wealth of data we collect every day can fill those models.

The challenge, of course, is to address privacy issues, access issues, and people’s basic need to participate. But our inability to deliver affordable health care to billions of people on the planet may be a key driver in making this happen.

Sandler and Plantiga, however, are simply focused on one aspect: movement.

“I feel like we’re building and where we want to go in the next five years is to be the backbone for that world around the biomechanics and movement lens, which is interesting to the quarter that deals with musculoskeletal issues,” he says. We can monetize that data. We can build predictive analytics around different disease outcomes like Parkinson’s, progressions, relapses. It’s that data set and I think what we can do with it over the next four to five years is going to be really exciting.

Although I’m sure it can be done with permission and respect for privacy, monetizing the data seems bad.

But extracting all the information about our bodies and health from our devices and using them for better, faster and cheaper health care outcomes in a safe and secure way: that’s an interesting goal.

Register TechFirst over here; Finding a Copy Our conversation.