Perspective Chapter: Making the Shift to Personalized Preventive Medicine with Human Digital Twins

Abstract

Human digital twins (HDTs) have the potential to support a paradigm shift from one-size-fits-all sick care to highly personalized preventive healthcare. By providing important context for complex disease processes and enhancing our understanding of the dynamic interactions that lead to non-communicable diseases (NCDs), HDTs are poised to offer researchers, care providers, and public health agencies the toolset they need to predictively diagnose and treat NCDs with highly customized interventions. The precision health knowledge gained from HDTs can help patients understand their NCD risks, public health authorities support care pathways that effectively prevent or delay the onset of chronic diseases, and care providers prescribe interventions based on an individual’s unique biological, behavioral, and environmental characteristics. This chapter presents key human digital twin concepts and model performance evaluation criteria. Digital twin applications in preventive medicine research, clinical care, and public health are presented while acknowledging the associated challenges, including model robustness and ethical concerns surrounding the use of digital twins to model humans.