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.INDEX TERMS Digital twin, elderly healthcare, personal health management, cloud computing, precision medicine, interaction, convergence.
I. INTRODUCTIONAccording to the latest statistics from the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, the elderly population is forecasted to be 2.1 billion in 2050, with the aging population in the developing regions growing faster than in the developed regions [1]. In the aging society of the future, it is projected that nearly 50% of medical resources will be The associate editor coordinating the review of this manuscript and approving it for publication was Tai-Hoon Kim.
