Personalized Health Digital Twin
A living, evolving computational model of a person’s health, built by a student team, grounded in real clinical science, and designed to change how people understand their own bodies.
Research / DesignVirginia TechAdvanced Genomics Research Inc.
Project Fact Sheet
Virginia Tech, PBL Capstone / Integrated Project Design
Advanced Genomics Research Inc. (AGR)
Fall 2026 (16-week semester), presented at VT PBL Pitch Day
Research / Design: team kickoff and scoping
Healthcare Education · Emerging Technology Readiness
Patients, healthcare professionals and researchers
A person’s health is dynamic
Healthcare decisions are often based on periodic measurements, generalized population models and information collected during individual clinical visits. But a person’s health is dynamic. Medications, activity, sleep, diet, stress, hormonal changes and existing conditions interact over time in complex ways that a few checkups a year cannot capture.
Problem statementHow might we design and prototype a personalized health digital-twin platform that integrates individual health and physiological data to model changes in a person’s health over time and explore the potential effects of different behaviors, conditions, or interventions?
A digital twin is a computational representation of a real thing (a jet engine, a factory, a person) that keeps evolving as new information arrives.
A health digital twin combines a person’s demographic and clinical information with physiological measurements to show their current state, how it is changing, and how it might respond to different behaviors or interventions.
The need is close to home
Virginians live with diabetes (12.9% of adults), and 1 in 4 of them don’t know it yet.
Of Virginia adults report cardiovascular disease, still the state’s leading cause of death.
Women ages 45 to 64 in Virginia, the perimenopause and menopause transition window.
Life-sciences professionals work in Virginia, backed by $13B in 2025 industry investment.
Sources: Virginia Department of Health (2025); America’s Health Rankings (2024); U.S. Census Bureau ACS 2019–2023; Virginia Economic Development Partnership (2025).
One platform, many health journeys
Diabetes
Models relationships among glucose levels, meals, activity and medication.
Menopause
Examines symptoms, sleep, activity and physiological change over time.
Cardiovascular health
Incorporates heart rate, blood pressure, activity and other indicators.
The platform is designed to extend beyond these three and, over time, to take in real-time data from wearable and connected medical devices.
From data to insight
Inputs
- Demographic & clinical data (history, labs, encounters)
- Physiological measurements (vitals, symptom tracking)
- Wearable device streams (future extension)
Digital twin engine
- Integrate heterogeneous data
- Model relationships over time
- Represent uncertainty
Outputs
- Current-state view: where things stand today
- Change-over-time detection: what’s shifting, and when
- “What-if” exploration: effects of behaviors and interventions
Key challenges
Semester roadmap
Onboarding & scoping
Scope document and chosen pilot condition
Architecture & data design
Architecture diagram and data source plan
Data pipeline
Working pipeline on sample data
Core modeling
Prototype model producing individual-level output
Intervention simulation
Demo of a “what-if” scenario
Privacy & extensibility check
Design memo on privacy and extending to a second condition
Integration & testing
Stable end-to-end prototype
Final demo
Final demo, report/poster, code handoff
The people behind the project
JS
Dr. Janet Shufor Bih
PhD, Learning Sciences · Intelligent Futures, sponsor lead
SC
Sine Charles, DBA
CEO, Advanced Genomics Research Inc. / Antifragility Health Clinic
NK
Noel Kuriakos
Curriculum Designer (Math, Physics, CS/ICT & AI)
VT
Virginia Tech Student Team
Project-based learning capstone team
Learn more about the project
Project brief
A one-page summary of the Health Digital Twin: the challenge, the plan and how to get involved.
→
Healthcare Education research
See how this project connects to our wider research on healthcare education and emerging technology.
News from the Health Digital Twin
No posts found!