By Healthcare Brew Staff
less than 3 min read
Definition:
As the digital representations of physical things (things like places, systems, processes, and people), digital twins have three components: A physical element, that physical element’s digital representation, and real-time data that links the two together.
Key Takeaways
Body double
Digital twins are currently leveraged by a variety of industries from healthcare to manufacturing. Organizations will invest in digital twins—which can cost anywhere from a few hundred to millions of dollars—to better understand how physical entities behave under different stimuli and conditions. For example, the aerospace industry uses digital twins to better understand how a spacecraft may react in different scenarios. Meanwhile, the healthcare industry uses digital twins to test new medications.
Good twin!
There are several benefits to using digital twins. For one, they can help businesses identify potential malfunctions and complications that can happen to the entity they are simulating down the line, allowing them to save costs and improve product designs. Digital twins also come in handy for environmentally conscious organizations because they help reduce the amount of materials wasted during product development.
Evil twin?
While digital twins can be extremely useful, they come with their own set of cybersecurity risks because of the rich data they leverage. If a malicious actor were to gain access to a digital twin, they could potentially do nefarious things like steal intellectual property.
Twin fever
Industries are still in the early stages of digital twin adoption, but that may not be for too long. An EY report predicts the global digital twin market will be worth almost $138 billion by 2030, up from $9 billion in 2022.
