I learned about the concept of digital twins today, and while I can see the potential it scares the h*ll out of me, mostly because I also forsee the huge mismanagement of controlling personal data in our diabetic lives. I think we are currently the guinea pigs for highly personal data collection in this future tech. Look up digital twin if you are unfamiliar with this term and let’s discuss this.
I have never heard of this, so I briefly looked it up. I’m curious what you are concerned about - I don’t see anything about our lives being controlled? If anything, it looks like it is helpful to improve patient care.
3 Likes
Lucy, the concept of digital twins is primarily used in the context of technical products or processes, which are duplicated by a model that represents their function, and that is fed back by constant monitoring from a harness. There is no such thing around humans today. The first applications in health care today involve the tight monitoring of a medical condition, typically in a hospital environment (because you need constant feedback), in order to better understand what the condition entails and therefore remediate, mitigate or alleviate it. It is nowhere near as precise as the much simpler process in existence today for industrial processes.
Digital twins is a fancy vulgarization name for a concept that has existed for 70-80 years, since the 1950s, called Model Reference Adaptive Control (MRAC), developed by Landau in Grenoble, Astrom in Lund, and Auslander in Berkeley. The concept is that you put a model in parallel to the real world, tune the model simulation to mimic the real world best, and use the result to control the real life process as best as can be. I wrote a PhD dissertation near this topic in 1992… So you can see that it has existed forever.
The fact that the concept is now entering public awareness has nothing to do with its newness—it is an old and well-known theory. It is only in science fiction that you need to worry about it: I can think of about a million things today to be more worried about.
4 Likes
https://vivatech.com/news/who-owns-your-digital-twin-ethical-challenges-in-healthcare
It may not be available now, but it will be. This piece sheds some light on the concerns with data privacy and ownership involved with digital twins in healthcare.
1 Like
I didn’t read the piece. We all have concerns about our own privacy and, given that most of us wear equipment that constantly monitors our performance, our BG, our insulin, our eating, every one of us can and should care about where that data goes and, indeed, who owns it.
I’m rather extreme; I don’t let Dexcom own my data by the simple method of not giving it to them, likewise Insulet. I don’t care much about privacy, I would rather everyone knows my BG all the time and those who profit from that knowledge pay me a reasonable amount for the use of my own copyright data.
I do disagree with you on one point:
We aren’t experimental subjects (“guinea pigs”), we’re the result. It is a done deal, and not just for diabetics; all our data is being collected, all the time.
1 Like
In fact, this piece does not raise any points that are specific to so-called “digital twins” tech:
- their ownership point, the primary one, is traditional data privacy issue, no more, no less.
- their security point is moot, and is also super standard: there is no way to protect data online. One day or another it will be breached. At most one can set minimal requirements.
- their consent point does not specify anything about what consent would apply to. “Digital twins” as they refer to it predicts outcomes. It is no more than a refinement of what a standard diagnosis process is. Are they going to ask that no diagnosis be done?
- As for their transparency point-requiring companies and providers to disclose commercial uses of digital twins?? As mentioned above, “digital twins” is an advertising name that corresponds to no true reality or core technology. Any kind of diagnosis process could be named a digital twin, since it is based on actual patient data. What does it cover? Where does it stop? It simply shows that it is written by someone who understands little or nothing about this technology.
Which brings an interesting point: who is Vivatech, the organization behind the website that is being quoted? Vivatech, in fact, is an advertising company, which publicizes a big medical/business forum, the association of the Publicis group, one of the largest advertising companies in the world, and the unreliable French mag Les Echos… There is no scientific or motivational validity behind these guys.
So let’s not get panicked by a tempest in a teapot raised by an advertising company, particularly when there is no actual health tech behind all these issues today.