A Novel Cloud-Based Framework for the Elderly Healthcare Services Using Digital Twin

TLDR

Digital twin technology, powered by big data, cloud computing, and IoT, is increasingly applied in industry and healthcare for simulation, medical pathway planning, resource allocation, and activity prediction, yet achieving lifelong personal health management for the elderly and integrating physical and virtual medical worlds remain key challenges. The study proposes a cloud-based digital twin healthcare framework (CloudDTH) to deliver accurate, fast, and personalized elderly healthcare services by enabling interaction and convergence between physical and virtual medical spaces. CloudDTH is a generalized, extensible cloud framework that monitors, diagnoses, and predicts individual health using wearable medical devices, implements a digital twin healthcare model, and incorporates key enabling technologies such as real-time data integration and predictive analytics. The feasibility of the framework is demonstrated through application scenarios and a real-time supervision case study.

Abstract

With the development of technologies, such as big data, cloud computing, and the Internet of Things (IoT), digital twin is being applied in industry as a precision simulation technology from concept to practice. Further, simulation plays a very important role in the healthcare field, especially in research on medical pathway planning, medical resource allocation, medical activity prediction, etc. By combining digital twin and healthcare, there will be a new and efficient way to provide more accurate and fast services for elderly healthcare. However, how to achieve personal health management throughout the entire lifecycle of elderly patients, and how to converge the medical physical world and the virtual world to realize real smart healthcare, are still two key challenges in the era of precision medicine. In this paper, a framework of the cloud healthcare system is proposed based on digital twin healthcare (CloudDTH). This is a novel, generalized, and extensible framework in the cloud environment for monitoring, diagnosing and predicting aspects of the health of individuals using, for example, wearable medical devices, toward the goal of personal health management, especially for the elderly. CloudDTH aims to achieve interaction and convergence between medical physical and virtual spaces. Accordingly, a novel concept of digital twin healthcare (DTH) is proposed and discussed, and a DTH model is implemented. Next, a reference framework of CloudDTH based on DTH is constructed, and its key enabling technologies are explored. Finally, the feasibility of some application scenarios and a case study for real-time supervision are demonstrated.