Digital Twins for Healthcare 4.0—Recent Advances, Architecture, and Open Challenges

Recent trends have shown a widespread increase in the landscape of digital healthcare (i.e., Healthcare 4.0) services, such as personalized healthcare, intelligent rehabilitation, telemedicine, and smart diet management, among others. These healthcare services are based on a variety of diverse requirements. Fulfilling these requirements require proactive intelligent analytics and self-sustainability of networks. Self-sustainability enables the operation of a network with minimum possible interaction from the end-users/network operators, whereas proactive intelligent analytics enables efficient management of resources in response to users’ requests. To enable healthcare 4.0 with proactive online analytics and self-sustainability, one can leverage digital twins. In this article, we present an overview and recent advances of digital twins for healthcare 4.0. An architecture of digital twins for healthcare is also proposed. Furthermore, we present several use cases of digital twins. Finally, we present open research challenges with possible solutions.