eHealth and apps
In ISBgroup, we not only work with development and experimental validation of the digital twins, but with their implementation in various types of end usages. At the heart of these implementations lies the development of new eHealth technologies and apps. These are developed by a team that overlaps between the research group and the various spinoff companies. So e.g. Greta Nilsson and Diala Kul started out as employed within the research group, but are now employed 100% in the spinoff company SUND sound medical decisions. Other members, e.g. William Lövfors and Kajsa Tunedal, have shared positions between SUND and Linköping university. In this way, we have a continuous journey and tight connections, all the way from basic research to commercialization and end-usage. The long-term goal is to develop an eco-system, where the digital twins are used in variety of different situations, including e.g. education, healthcare, health and fitness, eldercare, culture and entertainment, etc. This is part of the development of P4-medicine (see figure below, and e.g. this blog).
In this commercialization journey, the company SUND lies at the heart of these developments, but there is in fact an eco-system of different companies. More specifically, SUND owns the backend, where the digital twins are simulated and visualized. SUND is then collaborating with other companies, to make these twins available to various other companies and end-usages. One of these companies is AstraZeneca, which uses our digital twin models in their drug development. Another important company is Lev Skönare. Lev Skönare is a joint venture co-founded and partially owned by SUND. The other main shareholders and co-founders are company Z2 Invest, which develops the personal data vault where the patient data is stored, and the Swedish health guru Johan Holmsäter. Together with Lev Skönare, we develop and now also sell apps for usage in health promoting situations, such as company healthcare. You can read more about these companies here.
In practice, the apps are developed in a user-centric way, revolving around co-development and human centric design, in compliance with the principles in iso-9241-210 (see Figure 2). In this design process, the first step is to do extensive interviews with end-users, to understand the needs of the end-user (clinician, patient, nurse, etc). Thereafter, these needs are turned into an evolving set of requirements, and into sketches of designs, which are iteratively refined in dialogue with the end-users until the designs meet the requirements. On a more practical note, the main language for the backend is Python, and our own software package for simulation of models. However, some models are simulated in other packages, such as NEURON (for neural network simulations), OpenSim (for biomechanical simulations), and OpenCor (for CellML models), etc. The apps are developed in Flutter, which is a platform independent language, which runs on both MacOS and Android. A few screenshots from the apps can be seen below.
Key personnel
Gunnar Cedersund
Elin Nyman
Greta Nilsson
Diala Kul
Henrik Podéus
William Lövfors
Dirk de Weerd
Kajsa Tunedal