Digital twin
Digital Health and AI
Definition. A digital twin is a dynamic virtual model of a physical object, process or person that is updated with real data and used to simulate, monitor and optimise the real counterpart.
Explanation
The concept matured in industry, where digital twins support design and operations (Tao et al., 2018). In health care, proposals include patient-level twins for early disease detection, such as Parkinson disease (Abirami & Karthikeyan, 2023), and system-level twins that use discrete-event simulation to optimise critical care workflows (Appuhamilage et al., 2025).
Health digital twins raise questions about data integration, validation, privacy and the gap between technical promise and organisational value. They are best treated as decision-support tools whose assumptions must be made explicit.
Related concepts
Discrete-event simulation Artificial intelligence (AI) Patient flow Cybersecurity Data governance
Read on The Health Topics
- Digital Twin in Industry: State-of-the-Art
- Digital Twins in Healthcare:The Technology That Wants to Clone You – Virtually
- The Silent Paradox of the Digital Twin in Healthcare: Can “Better Care” and a “More Efficient System” Meet in the Same Model?
References
Abirami, L., & Karthikeyan, J. (2023). Digital Twin-Based Healthcare System (DTHS) for Earlier Parkinson Disease Identification. IEEE Access, 11. https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2023.3312278
Appuhamilage, G. D. K. K., Hussain, M., Zaman, M., & Khan, W. A. (2025). A health digital twin framework for discrete event simulation based optimised critical care workflows. NPJ Digital Medicine, 8 (1), Article 376. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41746-025-01738-4
Tao, F., Zhang, H., Liu, A., & Nee, A. Y. C. (2018). Digital Twin in Industry: State-of-the-Art. IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics, 14 (4), 1722–1731. https://doi.org/10.1109/TII.2018.2873186
Cite this entry: Kurutkan, M. N. (2026). Digital twin. In The Health Topics glossary. https://healthtopic.org/glossary/digital-twin/
Articles that discuss this concept
8 articles on The Health Topics mention this concept. Most relevant first.
- Digital Twins in Healthcare:The Technology That Wants to Clone You — Virtually 60
- The Silent Paradox of the Digital Twin in Healthcare: Can “Better Care” and a “More Efficient System” Meet in the Same Model? 34
- Digital Twin in Industry: State-of-the-Art 10
- Digital Twin Driven Health Management for Complex Equipment 5
- Cloud-Based Digital Twin Framework for Elderly Healthcare 4
- Visual Representation of Sociotechnical System Paradigms: A Critical Evaluation of the Scoping Review by Bogna et al. (2026) 3
- Human Factors in Health Informatics: Recent Advances 1
- Quantum Computing’s Impact on Medical Sciences 1