Creating ‘digital twins’ for the future of personalized wellness
Researchers at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine’s Media and Innovation Lab (TheMIL) recently announced they are working on the MILBox project to create “digital twins” of patients to virtually test and evaluate treatment options and outcomes before applying them in the physical world, according to a news release.
In partnership with Amazon Web Services and Open Health Network, the “digital twins” will be created by collecting health and environmental data from wearable devices and in-home sensors.
“We want to demonstrate that this kind of individualized data capture can spur a new line of research and personalization in healthcare,” Azizi Seixas, founding director of TheMIL and lead researcher on the project, said in the news release. “With the capacity to discover everything we can about the individual, we can change the relationship between people and their health.”
Seixas also said they want to make precision healthcare technologies more accessible to greater populations, especially those who face barriers to affordable healthcare.
“With this study, we hope to scientifically showcase the medical benefits of personal technologies so that in the future, they can be incorporated throughout medical practices and covered by personal—as well as state—healthcare plans,” Seixas said in an email. He’s also an associate director for the Translational Sleep and Circadian Sciences Program at the Miller School.
The first phase of the study will look at the linkage between poor sleep and health conditions, based on Seixas’ earlier research, which was funded by the National Institutes of Health. According to the news release, the first participants were enrolled late last year, but the researchers are seeking to include 1,500 diverse individuals from underserved communities in Florida and New York to study their sleeping patterns, weight, air quality and stress levels.
Each participant will have a MILBox kit, which contains various sensors and devices to capture and catalog the data, including an ambulatory blood pressure monitor, an actigraph, a smart scale, an air quality device and a mobile phone to transmit data to the cloud. The results will be combined, creating a “biological health algorithm that will act as a ‘digital twin’ of the individual.” Seixas said he expects the study to be completed in three years, along with the results. ■