SingHealth expands digital twin tech use for surveillance of disease outbreaks

It is also testing the tech for workflow and facility planning.

After studying the use of NFT for healthcare, SingHealth is using digital twin tech to improve care for patients by boosting disease outbreaks surveillance, redesigning workflow in hospitals, and healthcare facility planning.

In a statement, SingHealth said the implementation of a 4-Dimensional Disease Outbreak Surveillance System (4D-DOSS) seeks to unlock different possible applications in healthcare settings, including near real-time monitoring, analysis, prediction, and simulation of disease outbreaks and beyond. 

According to SingHealth, the digital twin will use advanced spatial mapping platforms and boosts existing healthcare data systems to develop a “living” digital replica or “twin” of a space or system. 

“Such spatial systems can be beneficial for infectious disease surveillance because tracking of these diseases within complex healthcare environments requires data to be represented in space and time, to map out contact networks,” it said.

SingHealth revealed that its test projects on the digital twin resulted in effective patient infectious disease surveillance involving the processing of multiple types of data such as patient symptoms, movement, and locations and results of relevant laboratory and radiological tests.

Through the digital twins of SGH, staff can visualise and assess disease spread across time and distance, detect infection clusters in test data, and predict the risk of future infection.