Ghislaine Boddington is a senior researcher at the University of Greenwich who studies the merging of our physical and digital bodies. In ‘Me and my digital twin’, she investigates how digital human twins could be a potential near future for many of us.

In practical terms, a digital bio-twin is made up of continuously measured multiple biological signals from your body. These might include your heartbeat, breath, temperature and muscle tension, as well as food intake, exercise and mental health – all fed into an avatar body. By combining AI and, for example, scanning our bodies and faces, cloning our voice and mannerisms, our virtual twin could become more and more like us. 

Ghislaine learns how to build her own digital twin in a journey that involves meeting a variety of people with expertise in the field, including Professor Declan O’Regan, Head of the Computational Cardiac Imaging Group at the MRC Laboratory of Medical Sciences. 

Declan and his team use MRI scanning to create rich images of the heart that aren’t possible to see otherwise. Using the computer vision techniques – such as those many of us have on our phones to recognise people’s faces – the team can track the motion of the heart in thousands of points in real time. Their goal is to integrate data from thousands of patients into one digital encyclopedia of heart disease.  

This digital twin of our own heart built upon large and diverse data resources could be constantly updated with new information to better understand and improve our own health. 

Me and my digital twin was released on 24 November 2024 and is available to listen to here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0k6c38h