Digital Twins for Personalized Medicine.

Reminds me in the human sense of agent based models.   And their use to address group behavior. Interesting, but not necessarily predictive.   The article quotes George Box, who said  'All Models are wrong, some are useful'.    How correct will the models be, how useful?   We expect personal accuracy from medicine.  Worth examining.

Digital Twins for personalized medicine: promising, with caveats    By Neil Raden  in SiliconAngle

" ... Digital Twins, a concept from the “industrial internet of things” or IIoT, is the discipline of devising highly capable simulation models, especially those that consume streaming data from sensors to anticipate maintenance issues, impending failure of components and improving performance. In terms of the degree of difficulty of modeling, Digital Twins for IIoT machines such as jet engines, oil wells and wind turbines are actually at the lower end as they employ detailed knowledge of the engineering of the objects. These Digital Twins may be quite complex, but because they are well-understood, the models are more likely to be useful.

Devising a simulation model of human behavior, such as the classical propensity models, is much more difficult because humans are so unpredictable and engineering approaches obviously don’t apply. In effect, these models may do a good job of predicting propensity based (on) many criteria, but at any given moment for any given individual, their predictive capability is quite low.  .... "