Digital Twins for Remote ECG Monitoring

Digital twins provide virtual replicas of medical systems, reshaping the E-Health industry towards smart, intelligent, and proactive services. With most existing biosensor solutions, patient data is transmitted over Bluetooth to a gateway that in turn connects via Ethernet to a file server (or cloud) for storage and analysis. In this work, a performance twin of a biosensor is developed, generating self-similar ECG data at increased rates compared to the actual device. In addition, we design a biosensor digital twin representation in the open-source Eclipse Ditto twin management system. We evaluate the scalability of the traditional file server and the digital twin approach. Our results indicate that the file server scales slightly better than the digital twin since Ditto operates in soft real-time only for rates below 4096 pulses/s. The digital twin's energy costs from the client/server viewpoints are also much higher.