Researchers are creating "digital twins" of COVID-19 long-haulers, those who develop long-term symptoms after being infected, to study the condition's effects on the body, Dell Technologies announced May 5.
To create the twins, data nonprofit i2b2 transSMART will use Dell's computing and data storage infrastructure to pull de-identified COVID-19 patient data, spanning hospital records to real-time data from health wearables. Digital twins allow the research team to conduct various kinds of testing in a virtual, simulated environment.
The digital twins will be shared with researchers from more than 200 hospitals and research centers worldwide, allowing them to conduct millions of different simulations to identify which treatments are best for COVID-19 long-haulers in a much shorter time frame than human trials would require.