This project of the overarching convergence flagship ‘My Digital Twin’ investigates, co-creates and works towards implementation of a dynamic Digital Twin to promote individual health and a life course approach of care. The involved researchers are looking at how AI technologies can be applied for preventive health care and how users (patients and care providers) can best interact with these technologies. A digital twin concept has been developed for pregnant women. Based on all sorts of data, including medical and lifestyle data, the digital twin can predict the chance that hypertension, a serious health damaging event for mother and baby, may occur. Being able to make such predictions and develop interventions to prevent the development of hypertension is one thing, but it is also important to develop suitable ways for communicating these predictions and interventions with pregnant women. The researchers are therefore researching what pregnant women value the most throughout the pregnancy journey and how their values can be incorporated into the design of the digital twin, so that the digital twin can play a meaningful role in the interaction between woman and care provider. The results show that trust is a very important value for pregnant women that is closely linked with the autonomy that these women, their care providers and the digital twin itself have in medical decision-making. Through a set of provoking prototypes, the researchers have been experimenting how different levels of autonomy of a digital twin influences the trust that pregnant women and care providers have in medical decision-making. The insights of these experiments are used to work towards a dynamic digital twin concept that is based on a generic technology, but that that can be tailored in a modular way to personal values and preferences.

One of the next steps is to develop ‘Our smart family buddy’ checking how we can implement the dynamic digital twin concept at a neighborhood level. How can digital twin technology enable and support people to take care of each other? Another step is to investigate how AI technology can respond to the fact that people’s values may change over time. How can AI based health technologies themselves bring the values that are important to people more to the surface and adapt to these so that such technologies can become more dynamic and meaningful to individuals throughout their interactions with them.