Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), a global leader in IT services and business consulting with $27.9 billion in revenue the most recent fiscal year, announced that Des Linden, the celebrated Boston Marathon champion and two-time Olympic marathoner, will be the inaugural recipient of a state-of-the- art Digital Twin Heart, designed to optimize athletic performance and advance personalized healthcare.
What is a Digital Twin Heart: A Digital Twin Heart is a real-time, virtual replica of a person’s heart, offering precise data on its function, efficiency, and response to varying conditions. Linden will have access to a tool that offers unprecedented insights into her cardiovascular health throughout her training. The Digital Twin Heart represents a significant leap forward in the integration of technology, sports science, and healthcare.
Why This Matters: Digital twin technology is set to transform how elite athletes train, compete, and manage their health while demonstrating the power and potential of personalized health and wellness.
Digital Twin Heart technology encompasses a range of pioneering features:
1. Real-Time Monitoring: A Digital Twin Heart can continuously monitor cardiovascular parameters, including heart rate, blood flow, and oxygen levels, providing instant feedback during training and competition. This real-time data empowers athletes to make informed decisions about their training, recovery, and race strategy.
2. Simulations: A Digital Twin Heart enables an endless number of simulations with various training scenarios. By rehearsing the future in the digital world, an athlete can prepare for peak performance in the real world regardless of race day conditions.
3. Personalized Healthcare: The Digital Twin Heart represents the convergence of sports science and personalized medicine. The insights gathered from a person’s Digital Twin Heart can allow for the development of individual healthcare interventions and treatment plans.
What They’re Saying
• Des Linden, the 2018 Boston Marathon champion and two-time Olympian, said, 'Digital Twin Heart technology will not only provide unique insights into heart health and performance, it can pave the way for future athletes and individuals to optimize their health and wellness. Digital
twin technology has the potential to make everyone’s training so dialed in and can inspire more people to run.”
• Debashis Ghosh, President - Life Sciences and Healthcare Business Group, TCS, said, 'Sports and technology have tremendous power to come together and change lives. Des’s Digital Heart can optimize her training, performance, and recovery but this technology is important for reasons far beyond sports – it can ignite a personal healthcare revolution. With heart disease the
leading cause of death in the U.S., it is more important than ever to innovate techniques to keep
hearts healthy.”
• Dr. Gabe Vorobiof, Clinical Professor of Medicine (Cardiology), said, 'No two hearts are the same. Digital twin technology will enable us to see, measure, and monitor a heart - and simulate responses under varying degrees of stress - without invasive procedures. This has the potential to lead to better patient experiences and better health outcomes. I applaud efforts, like Des Linden's partnership with TCS, to demonstrate the power and potential of digital twin technology for healthcare.'
Go Deeper: How Digital Twins are Transforming Healthcare
• Digital BioTwins – digital versions of human organs – give doctors, researchers, and surgeons new and highly advanced ways to test the effectiveness of different treatments.
• They can research new drugs and ensure their safety, practice a new operation technique without risk to life, and predict what will happen to patients in response to any number of scenarios.
• Digital BioTwins are powerful because they enable accurate, replicable care without intrusion or risk.
Go Deeper: Digital Twins of Entire People
• Advancements in Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), 5G, computational power, cloud connectivity, real time data analytics, Virtual Reality, and Augmented Reality mean that a world where doctors know what is happening inside their patients’ bodies at all times via digital twins isn’t far off.
• TCS’s 2023 Digital Twindex report showed that futurists and industry experts believe digital twins will make their way into every government, business, home, and human by 2035. The
report also identified digital twins’ ability to power connected, real-time healthcare as one of the digital twin use-cases that will most impact human life.
Go Deeper: The Digital Twin Difference at TCS
• TCS recently announced a partnership with Dassault Systèmes to join the Living Heart Project, which unites cardiologists, researchers, educators, regulators, and other experts to develop and validate realistic digital simulations of the human heart.
• The partnership and project to create an advanced Digital Heart for one of the world’s top athletes is designed to prove the tremendous potential of digital twins for both the future of athletic performance and overall health and wellness, driving change and improving lives.
