Digital Twins in Development of Medical Products—The State of the Art

This article provides a Structured Literature Review (SLR) on the uses of Digital Twins (DT-Is) in the development of medical products. The purposes of our SLR are to find out (1) whether existing DT-I technologies are mature enough to be adopted for new medical product development, and (2) if the answer to item (1) is no, what existing works can be utilized in developing DT-Is for designs of bone fixations? It is our finding that numerous works are reported on using DT-Is in healthcare applications such as remote surgeries, remote diagnoses, personalized medicines, and assistive technologies. These applications involve one-to-one correspondence of physical and digital entities but exhibit several limitations in (1) inheriting and transferring knowledge from legacy products to new products and (2) a lack of a systematic approach in creating innovations for new product development. We suggest adopting Digital Triad (DT-II) for medical product development. A background study on using DT-II for the design of bone staples is conducted to illustrate the feasibility of the proposed idea.