Having a ‘digital twin’ to boost athletic performance is closer to becoming reality than you may think | Canada Voices

Located around the halfway mark, the stretch over the Queensboro Bridge in the TCS New York City Marathon is infamous for its arduous climb and lack of cheering section. In the race’s 2022 edition, two-time U.S. Olympian Des Linden said the bridge was the point at which she entered into a deep “suffer fest.”

But two years later, as she crested the same climb, Ms. Linden, 41, was racing with an advantage that gave her the confidence to dig deeper and lean into the pain – a digital twin of her heart telling her how her body would react.

“There’s always a big move there and I think I really chipped away at it more than I would have without this information because I was so afraid of it in the past,” she said. Ms. Linden finished the 2024 race in about two hours and 29 minutes – roughly three minutes faster than her attempt two years prior.

A digital twin is like a digital copy, but slightly more advanced. Both are digital versions of something physical, like a heart. However, while a digital copy is a representation of something in the moment it was copied, a digital twin is regularly updated with information fed to it by sensors, which are attached to the physical item that’s being replicated.

Ms. Linden is one of six elite and recreational runners who worked with Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), a global IT services and consulting company and title sponsor of several international marathons, including the Toronto Waterfront Marathon, to have a digital twin made of her heart. Titled the “Future Athlete Project,” its results demonstrate the potential for digital twins to be used in personal health care and wellness applications. From a training tool for athletes to an early-detection device for dangerous diseases, experts say the use of digital twins in personalized health care is closer to becoming reality than you may think.

How do you make a digital twin of a heart?

Brian Purvis, a project manager at TCS, said creating Ms. Linden’s digital heart began with her getting an MRI, so they could see the physical structure of her heart. Then, Ms. Linden wore a chest strap while running for 13 weeks to track data such as heart rate. Using that data, and some historical data previously collected by Ms. Linden, TCS created a digital twin of her heart that could be tested in race or workout simulations to understand how her physical heart reacts, and recovers, when challenged.

New York was Ms. Linden’s 28th marathon. By now, she has the motions of a race down to a science. In fact, Ms. Linden has been running marathons for so long that TCS’s data revealed her heart is cardiac remodelled, a condition commonly known as “athlete’s heart,” meaning it can expand and contract better than runners much younger than her.

“She has that heart probably because she has always pushed herself past what she should be pushing,” said Bill Quinn, a futurist at TCS.

Despite her decades of experience, many of the insights TCS shared with Ms. Linden were previously unknown to her, she said. For example, Mr. Purvis said she has an impressive ability to recover while running, meaning if she slows down a little in the middle of a race, that could actually help her finish stronger, and faster.

“To know that you could get into a race and get into a hard spot and be like, ‘Okay, I can cover a move and then back off a little bit and I’m gonna recover and have my legs back under me. I’ve seen this in the data. I know that my body has that ability to do it,’ ” Ms. Linden said.

The idea of digital twins influencing runners’ race strategy is particularly exciting, Mr. Quinn said.

“Having those insights and having the data to say, ‘Here’s what you should be doing to meet your maximum potential,’ gives you that mental grit to be able to push through some of that pain you might have,” he said.

Mr. Quinn said part of the reason TCS included amateur runners in its project is because they want this technology to become something that can be used by a diversity of athletes, with a variety of budgets.

“This isn’t just for the folks that are coming across the finish line first. It’s for all of us, right? And that’s really the hope, is that this will be something leveraged and used, not just to improve our running, but to improve our overall health and wellness,” he said.

As part of the Future Athlete Project, Mr. Purvis said TCS aims to create digital twins of other body parts. However, he emphasized the company’s work with the technology is purely research-based and when it comes to discussions around scaling it up, the possibilities are exciting – yet still unclear.

Will we all have a digital twin one day?

The commercialization of digital twins has clear potential, said Jun Deng, a professor of therapeutic radiology at the Yale University School of Medicine whose research includes the use of digital twins in health care.

To scale it up, he said, first a company would need to create a baseline digital model of a heart that could be adapted to different users, based upon their personal data. Then, by using a combination of software (an app or website) and hardware (a sensor, perhaps in a wearable device), a subscription-based service could monitor the activity, strengths and weaknesses of a person’s heart. It could even be used to predict susceptibility to certain diseases, he added.

“With digital modelling testing their heart and then doing real-world analysis and updating the information, predicting the future, that would be very powerful,” Dr. Deng said.

Alex Ramirez, an associate professor of information systems and business analytics at Carleton University, said anyone who wears a smart watch is often already relying upon a similar technology to make decisions about their health.

However, the question of whether these sensors – a defining characteristic of any digital twin – stay on the outside of the body is a whole other matter, he said. To reach peak accuracy with a digital twin, it would make sense for a person to have a sensor inside of them, which can communicate with an app or computer through the internet. With certain conditions, this approach could mean an overall healthier population, Dr. Ramirez said.

“Wouldn’t it be fantastic if we were able to put a sensor somewhere in the brain that is going to tell us when someone is starting to go into a depression, for example?” he said.

However, the privacy concerns that accompany something like an internal sensor, which is constantly collecting personal health data, are strong. Dr. Deng said privacy is one of the reasons the use of digital twins hasn’t fully taken off in hospitals yet.

Fear was one of the first emotions that Ms. Linden said she felt when she thought about the data collection that would be required to create the digital twin. Over time, she said her trust in TCS and realization of the benefits of the process helped her feel at ease.

Now, she sees this technology as another way for athletes to specialize their training, and something she said she would happily tap into for her next marathon build.

“I think that’s the future of the sport,” she said. “We’ve seen super shoes. We’ve seen fuel get better. Everything is about hyperfocusing and looking for that little edge.”