Designing a Digital Twin to Improve Adherence and Care

Sammanfattning: This study aims to create a design concept for a digital twin to understand how it could be used to increase the health adherence of users through risk communication. This was done while also looking at how such a system could counteract potential health anxiety. The massive digitization and available data has enabled better opportunities to accurately represent and affect a person’s health in the form of a digital twin. The primary way of conducting the study was by using the ’Design Thinking’ method which incorporates five steps: Empathizing with the users’ needs, defining the problems, ideating, creating prototypes, and finally testing these. A literature study, four user interviews as well as two interviews with healthcare professionals were conducted to get a better understanding of what problems needed to be solved. The findings from these together with a brainstorming session resulted in low fidelity (LoFi) and high fidelity (HiFi) versions of a mobile prototype. A single overview page of a desktop version for health professionals was also created. The mobile prototypes were user tested, and input was asked from stakeholders and healthcare professionals regarding the risk communication and visualization via walkthroughs of the prototypes. The usability results of the tests were positive with the HiFi version scoring 83.5 / 100 on the System Usability Scale which measures usability, and this score is deemed to be ’good’. The risk communication used received positive feedback, and the findings showed that a digital twin could potentially help with adherence and prevention by the use of summaries, visualization, as well as combining icons with the use of absolute risk and frequencies. To minimize the risk of health anxiety, a digital twin could reduce health information that is not very serious or important through a ”less-is-more” approach. Other effective means could be to show positive visualization and by being mindful of the ordering of risks and benefits, showing the user the positive aspects after the negative ones. Despite this, because of the lower sample size and hypothetical test scenario, further studies need to be conducted to verify the validity in more real-life scenarios. More isolated testing should be done to understand the effects better, both in terms of risk communication and usability. Additional things that could be beneficial to look at could be the implementation of gamification elements in the digital twin, further development of a desktop version for healthcare staff, as well as using more personalization options.