Human OS: Why Digital Twin Tech Is Coming For Our Bodies
Soon, we could all have near-live digital representations of our bodies in data, tracking, measuring, and monitoring our movements, our activities, and our key health indicators for health, fitness, and wellness.
My smart ring measures body temperature, heart rate, movement, sleep. My smart watch monitors activity, workouts, blood pressure, blood oxygenation. My phone knows how many steps I’ve taken, and if changes in my pace suggest the potential onset of Parkinson’s disease. A small home-based spectrometer can tell you how your blood sugars or cholesterol levels react to different diets. Soon my shoes will know why my Achilles hurt, what’s efficient about my stride, how high I jump, and if my walking, running, or jumping dangerously preferences one side of my body.
“I believe we’re moving very rapidly into this world of personalized wellness, health care, fitness, performance,” Plantiga CEO Quin Sandler told me recently in a TechFirst podcast.
“I think this idea of comparing a human being to another human being is a very old age way of looking at everything. I think what’s going to happen here and where we feel like we’re going is really building the infrastructure to monitor the complexity of how a human being moves, and based on their goals, developing insights and recommendations and interventions — with a possible human in the loop — to really drive better outcomes. Whether, again, that’s performance, or recovery, or injury prevention.”
A Chinese AI passed the country’s national medical licensing exam five years ago, and another in the country of 1.4 billion people with only 3.8 million doctors is already supporting doctors to deliver healthcare faster and cheaper.
That doesn’t mean you or I want to see the virtual AI doctor on our next visit: it’s still early days. It does mean that technology is going to have a greater impact in monitoring and delivering healthcare in the future.
And let’s be honest: it’s much, much needed.
One thing’s clear, there are multiple devices collecting data from our bodies. Plantiga offers a smart sole that fits in your shoe and measures 150 different parameters, Sandler says, about how we walk, jump, turn, twist, and more. Plantiga, which has developed an AI “digital movement coach” named Norman after the CEO’s deceased father (also a co-founder of the company), started in the world of high-performance athletes.
One user: Olympic gold medalist Andre de Grasse, reigning Olympic champion in the 200 meters and recent gold medallist in the 4×100 meters at the 2022 World Championships.
But data on your performance is about more than Olympians. It’s also for seniors.
“Ultimately our goal is to take the power of analyzing human movement to drive better outcomes,” Sandler says. “Whether that is fall prevention in someone my mom’s age, someone that’s dealing with a neurodegenerative disease like Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s, or an athlete that’s recovering from an ACL or a hip injury.
