Health Simulations: Ethical and Societal Challenges of Digital Twins

Introduction

Digitisation has an impact on even the most fundamental concepts in medicine and public health, including our ideas of health and illness, embodiment, vulnerability, and controllability. Among the emerging technologies driving this paradigm shift is that of Digital Twins (DT), which presents exceptional challenges to healthcare governance, raising ethical and societal issues of which our understanding is still rudimentary.

Challenges of Digital Twins

DT may be empowering but could also exacerbate the vulnerability of both individual patients and the population at large. There are substantial gaps in our understanding of whether these new forms of artificial intelligence-driven health simulations provide new ways of engaging with experiences of human vulnerability, or whether they, in fact, introduce new forms of harm.

Project Overview

In this context, SIMTWIN will be the first project systematically identifying and examining the ethical and societal implications of the use of DT in healthcare. In doing so, SIMTWIN will promote our understanding of and practical approaches to new forms of simulation and prediction of health trajectories.

Objectives

SIMTWIN’s central objective is to provide a comprehensive and in-depth analysis of the normative challenges implied in order to develop an integrated theory of health simulations.

1. Propose an empirically-based and normatively robust framework for an ethical and societal assessment of this technology.
2. Enable the design of practical modes of controllability for the use of DT in health.

Significance

At a moment in history in which our societies find themselves facing crucial decisions on how to approach the complex issues raised by the dual, simultaneously transformative and disruptive character of health simulations, SIMTWIN promises ground-breaking insights into the associated normative and societal challenges and key orientations for a robust and innovative governance framework.