A Digital Twin Platform for Diagnostics and Rehabilitation of Multiple Sclerosis

Abstract

30 million people across Europe are affected approximately from rare diseases. The brain disorders (including, but not limited to those affecting mental health) remain a major challenge. The understanding of mental disorders’ determinants and causes, processes and impacts is a key to their prevention, early detection and treatment as well as factor for good health and well-being. In order to improve the health and disease understanding, a close linkage between fundamental, clinical, epidemiological and socio-economic research is required. Effective sharing of data, standardized data processing and the linkage of such data with large-scale cohort studies is a prerequisite for translation of research findings into the clinic. In this context, this paper proposes a platform for exploration of behavioral changes in patients with proven cognitive disorders with a focus on Multiple Sclerosis. It adopts the concept of a digital twin by applying the Big Data and Artificial Intelligence technologies to allow for deep analysis of medical data to estimate human health status, accurate diagnosis and adequate treatment of patients. The platform has two main components. The first component, provides functionality for diagnostics and rehabilitation of Multiple Sclerosis and acts as a main provider of data for the second component. The second component is an advanced analytical application, which provides services for data aggregation, enrichment, analysis and visualization that will be used to produce a new knowledge and support decision in each instance of the transactional component.

Digital Twins for Multiple Sclerosis

“…Petrova-Antonova et al developed a web-based DT platform for MS diagnosis and rehabilitation that consists of two components: a transactional application that automates tests for MS diagnosis and rehabilitation, and an analytic application that provides data aggregation, enrichment, analysis, and visualization that can be used in any instance of the transactional application to generate new knowledge and support decision making. However, the analytical application is currently undeveloped and subject to further research (119).…”

Human Digital Twins for Pervasive Healthcare: A Scoping Review (Preprint)

“…Examples of behavioral tracking included monitoring patient medication behavior [17], gait [44], bedside patient posture [16], and exercise posture [9]. Status measures included trauma severity [8], heart rate [3], and vital sign measurements for diagnosing health conditions [46], as well as mental health measures of cognition [29], stress [11], and emotional state [37].…”

Designing Human Digital Twins for Behaviour-Changing Therapy and Rehabilitation: A Systematic Review

“…Moreover, because the data is patient-related, data privacy and security play an even more critical role than, for example, in the industrial domain (de Maeyer and Markopoulos, 2020). Finally, especially in the field of behaviour-changing therapy and rehabilitation, human factors, such as human's physiological and cognitive state, as well as psychological factors, such as motivation and trust, become increasingly important (de Maeyer and Markopoulos, 2020;Petrova-Antonova et al, 2020). Behaviour-changing therapy and rehabilitation in this case describes any form of therapy that aims at helping the individual to change their behaviour in a certain way to improve their health state using behaviour change techniques like, for instance, using self-monitoring of the patient's behaviour and giving feedback on their performance (Michie et al, 2011).…”