The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) has most definitely hit the medical devices industry and that also means Orthotics. If you have never heard of IIoT I suggest you look up a definition and no, this isn’t something from a Black Mirror storyboard.
A small part of this will be computational twins, which have existed for decades with companies like Dassault Systèmes, or others you may have heard of like NASA. What started with aircraft engines, is now heavily underway with organic matter.
A digital twin is a computer program that takes real-world data about a physical object or system as inputs and produces an output of predications or simulations of how that physical object or system will be affected by those inputs.
The leap from R&D into real world cloud applications is gaining huge momentum, with several companies now completing Series A staging. As we become more plugged in and naively use various mediums to track personalised health biomarkers, the future is either rather depressing or utopian, depending on which side of the huge ethical AI fence you sit. This data will correlate directly with your projected death date, which in turn correlates to your pension, insurances, healthcare provision and so you’ll easily comprehend how AI, 5G, wearables and biomarkers will shape the future.
The release of virtual human body twins in a platform; brings together biosciences and engineering, enabling a stakeholder to project the data for an object into a complete living virtual model that can be fully configured and simulated. This is potentially ground breaking to the med tech industry, researchers, clinicians and even patients who can visualise, test, understand and predict the unseen. From pharma with disease, surgical outcomes and even the medical device industry, as these Orthoses transition to wearables.
Companies like Computational Life, a digital avatar platform, are principally engaged in cardiac research and development of medical devices in pre/post clinical phases. They have now pioneered what is likely to be the future, by converting their virtual models into an exact replica of the patient, by overlaying actual MRI scans of patients over their model, allowing the digital twin to possess all of the vascular features of the patients, to then track blood flow and organ response.
The above will be an absolute must in order to understand the effect of medical devices on the whole body. A chief complaint of many clinicians and certainly in Orthotics, is that no matter how good AM manufacturers are with scanning and AI, it can never replace the ability of the clinician to assess and feel the proprioceptive qualities of soft tissue and skeletal relationships.
Other highly beneficial outcomes to the above would be diminishing the need for animal testing and pushing the boundaries of utilising several hypotheses at once whilst analysing scenarios, which can be extremely difficult to test in a person. From simulating environmental extremes of altitude or temperature, or from just running ‘What if’ calculations. You can probably get away with a few prescription alterations, but certainly not several due to the demand clinically and also from the client stand point as trust and confidence wanes, as by the 10th iteration of the device you would have to question if you the clinician knew what the hell you were doing!
Is the future of Orthotic prescription in these cloud-based platforms pairing the digital twin with a digital version of the target Orthoses? I suppose it will be subject to bandwidth and processing (hello 5G). In reality however real-time tracking of individuals’ biomarkers, activity and the performance of any Orthotic device feels imminent.
I for one am looking forward to being able to use this tech in order to see the invisible; the interaction of orthoses with client, but in all of this we must not lose sight of the fact that it must be for the ‘common good’.
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