An Innovative Digital Twin Platform for Supporting Doctors and Patients Affected by Chronic Heart Failure

The last few years have demonstrated the importance of medical science in people’s lives. The combination of innovative technologies, such as the Internet of Things (IoT), Machine Learning (ML), and Edge Computing, is bringing various benefits to medical research. In this context, the “IMPROVE” project aims at proposing a scalable, low cost and non-intrusive Digital Twin platform to support the patients affected by heart disease and their doctors through innovative technologies and techniques to be applied at the Edge of the network (i.e., at home) and realizing the so-called home care assistance. This paper presents the first achievements of the project by introducing the innovative Digital Twin architecture, designed to serve two primary stakeholders: doctors/caregivers and patients. The proposed infrastructure combines IoT, ML and Edge Computing to expose two Digital Twin platforms to: a) support doctors by displaying real-time and historical patient data, predicting cardiac health risks, simulating treatment effects, and generating alerts for potential dangers, b) support home care patients by enabling real-time health monitoring, issuing alerts for anomalies, suggesting lifestyle improvements, and predicting the impact of behaviours on health, incorporating feedback from patients and doctors. By discussing the usefulness of each module and the potential benefits it brings to the two main stakeholders, this research contributes to the ongoing development of effective telemedicine solutions for managing chronic heart failure.