Star Trek-style scanner creates ‘digital twin’ to track your health
Imagine a Star Trek-style body scanner that examines your body in such depth that it can produce a 3D computerised model to track your health. Jeff Kaditz didn’t just imagine it, he built one. He’s the CEO of QBio, a US start-up that wants to facilitate a data-led, personalised approach to medicine. The firm’s scanner measures hundreds of biomarkers in a person’s body and tracks them over time in a so-called digital twin – a sort of databank-cum-avator of your body. Here, he tells us what the physical of the future looks like and how it will revolutionise healthcare.
What is a digital twin?
It’s basically a three-dimensional digital model of something. It isn’t new actually. In manufacturing, having a digital twin of, say, an aeroplane engine lets you tweak the design and see how it affects the model. The human body is different. It’s more that we’re tracking what’s changing in a digital twin across all these different biomarkers of your body, and identifying the progression of disease much earlier. So more of a diagnostic.
How does the scanner work?
The core physics that it uses is magnetic resonance, plus a lot of other sensors, but the significance of it is that it’s much cheaper and easier to site. The most important thing for us is that we could do these entire full-body scans in 15 minutes or less.
