An IoT-Enabled Digital Twin Architecture with Feature-Optimized Transformer-Based Triage Classifier on a Cloud Platform

It is essential to assign the correct triage level to patients as soon as they arrive in the emergency department in order to save lives, especially during peak demand. However, many healthcare systems estimate the triage levels by manual eyes-on evaluation, which can be inconsistent and time consuming. This study creates a full Digital Twin-based architecture for patient monitoring and automated triage level recommendation using IoT sensors, AI, and cloud-based services. The system can monitor all patients’ vital signs through embedded sensors. The readings are used to update the Digital Twin instances that represent the present condition of the patients. This data is then used for triage prediction using a pretrained model that can predict the patients’ triage levels. The training of the model utilized the synthetic minority over-sampling technique, combined with Tomek links to lessen the degree of data imbalance. Additionally, Lagrange element optimization was applied to select those features of the most informative nature. The final triage level is predicted using the Tabular Prior-Data Fitted Network, a transformer-based model tailored for tabular data classification. This combination achieved an overall accuracy of 87.27%. The proposed system demonstrates the potential of integrating digital twins and AI to improve decision support in emergency healthcare environments.