HELLO FUTURE: What if your doctor could make a digital copy of you?

Speaker 1 (00:07):
There's been a lot of talk about digital twins. Digital twins.
What does that mean? Could you have your digital twins
show up to work? What about in the hospital, or
what about a simulation of the universe? Digital twins, digital triplets,
digital quadruplets, It's all happening in the future. Hello Future,
it's me keV. This is a dispatch from the Digital Frontier.
The planet is Earth, the year is twenty twenty five.
It's almost twenty twenty six. And remember you can listen
to all of our episodes on the iHeartMedia appy short downloaded.
My guest today is Terry Poone. He's the CEO and
co founder of twin Health, and we're going to talk
about how artificial intelligence is being used to create digital
models of a person's health that updates in real time.
It's kind of crazy, and Terry, I don't really understand
any of this, Okay, I don't really get what a
digital twin is, and I don't get why I should
care about it. All I know is that it kind
of sounds like the matrix.

Speaker 2 (01:05):
Well, first off, thank you for having me Kevin. So
you know, I've had conversations about digital twins with various
folks and you know, usually I asked a question, have
you heard of digital twins? Then they say no, they
draw a blank. But then I asked the question, have
you seen the movie Apollo thirteen?

Speaker 3 (01:24):
Apollo thirteen?

Speaker 2 (01:25):
What happened was it was a mission to the Moon
and halfway to the Moon, the oxygen tanks exploded in
that rocket and then NASA had to get those astronauts
back to Earth. The way they did that was they
used a software model of that rocket that was a
digital twin, so they were able to simulate what would
happen if they tried different solutions to get the rocket
back to Earth. They were able to successfully get that
rocket back. And then since then, different industries have applied
digital twins to things like jet engines, wind turbine and
then Twin is the first company to apply that to
menabol account.

Speaker 1 (02:04):
That is really really cool. So it sounds like at
a very basic level, a digital twin is a simulation
or what's the difference between a digital twin and a simulation?

Speaker 2 (02:15):
So digital twin uses sensors and then uses an AI
model of a physical system to be able to run
different simulations. As you said, so what if you were
to do a or B or C. What would happen,
you know, are you able to successfully get that rocket
back to Earth or are you able to successfully improve
somebody's blood sugar or help them lose weight?

Speaker 1 (02:39):
So the twin is the infrastructure for the simulation.

Speaker 2 (02:42):
Yes, the twin is the representation of the physical system,
whether that be a car, a rocket, or the human body.

Speaker 1 (02:49):
Wow. Okay, so that's really interesting. So now I know
the difference between a digital twin and a simulation. Fascinating. Okay,
So it seems pretty interesting and in terms of the
applications for a human and health, and I think recently
the public and the general consciousness of society has woken
up to understanding if you continue down this path, eating
like this, this is the impact it'll have on your health.
Versus doing this path or cutting this out. This is
what it could it could lead up to it. And
it does seem like a very personal, simplistic actually concept
to grasp because even you know, I remember when I
was growing up outside of Phillian, Delca. You can still
hear a little bit of my accent. You know, my
mom would be like, well, play it forward, you know,
play it out for yourself. If you continue down this path,
this will happen. And if you continue on this path,
and now Terry Poon, you've got the data and the
technology to kind of give it credibility.

Speaker 2 (03:48):
The funny thing is, you know, it's one of these
things where it is about doing the right things right,
like you know, eating well and exercising and sleeping well
and reducing your stress. You know. So it sounds simple
at the high level, right, but the complexity is that
every human body is different. We all have different metabolisms.
If you and I were to eat the same food,
our bodies would respond.

Speaker 3 (04:12):
Differently to that same food.

Speaker 2 (04:13):
And so, you know, what we've seen a twin is
that it's a combination of your biology and your behavior.

Speaker 3 (04:20):
And your environments that makes this challenging.

Speaker 2 (04:23):
And for metabolism, it can have some some bad downstream effects,
you know, over time, so you can end up with
metabolic diseases like diabetes, pre diabetes, weight issues, or other
issues with you know, your liver or your cholesterol or
other things.

Speaker 3 (04:40):
So that's why it really matters.

Speaker 1 (04:42):
How would a person engage with the digital twin at
the doctor's office. Are they going to see a hologram
of themselves or are they or is it just more
just data or how how do they how do you
even take the data from the body to create a
digital twin.

Speaker 2 (04:58):
So what we do is we use multiple sensors that
collect about three thousand data points per person per day.
This includes sensors that measure your heart rate, your stress
or sleep, as well as sensors that measure.

Speaker 3 (05:13):
Your blood sugar, your blood pressure, your.

Speaker 2 (05:17):
Body composition like your weights, your visceral fat, muscle mass
and all that. And then you know, it's a ton
of data and it's hard to kind of understand on
your own, but with a product like what we have
at twin, it's able to understand all that data and
then generate insights and recommendations that make sense for you.
So then it's you know, recommendations every day that you
can use in terms of which foods would help you
improve your metabolism, and then in your conversations with your
doctor it can support that as well. So overall, for care,
it's a combination of you know, making the right lifestyle
choices as well as medications and managing those well. With
twin way able to reduce medications over time as your
metabolism heals.

Speaker 1 (06:04):
You could take this to an extreme where you know,
you have bodybuilders who want to be jacked and they
want to have a ton of muscles. You've got runners
who are bikers who want to be more lean, yogis
who want to be more flexible, and then you've got
other folks who are trying to lose weight, other folks
who are trying to gain weight and whatnot. I don't
want to live in a world where the doctor's telling me,
you know, like it's nineteen eighty four or whatever, let's
all look this way, or we want to live in
a certain thing. But at the same time, I love
the idea of data informing healthy well being in every
sense of the word, not just physical well being, but
mental and brain health wellbeing, you know, in the brain economy,
which is booming as well. And so I guess, how
is the digital infrastructure that is concocting the recommendations created
in the sense that the arbiter of truth, which is
the digital twin, the god of the digital twin, how
do you form that thinking of what is the recommendation?
Do you get a question I'm.

Speaker 3 (07:06):
Trying to get that I completely understand.

Speaker 2 (07:09):
Yeah, So for us, we really believe that it's it's
member choice.

Speaker 3 (07:15):
So every person has a different.

Speaker 2 (07:17):
Goal in mind. Some people, you know, our members come
from all walks of life and all different motivations. Some
people come in they have type two diabetes, but what
they really want to do is lose weight, and that's great,
you know, so we we have that as their member goal,
and then our recommendations are based on the goals that
member has. If they want to lose weight, we will
help them lose weight. If they want to normalize bludsuer
will help them lose that. So we really want to
tune the recommendations to what the member wants, because at
the end of the day, it's really the motivation and
the recommendations together they make the difference. You know, we
can recommend everything that we want, but if the member
doesn't care about that kind of goal, they're not going
to you know, they're not going to do it. So
it really the combination of the member's goals and motivations
along with the right recommendations that makes the difference.

Speaker 1 (08:05):
And you're arguing that this is the future, this is
the future of preventative health, that this is being able
to go to the doctor's office. I mean, I mean
it's not just to stick your tongue out and say, ah,
it's not just give me the stethoscope and let's check
your pulse. Okay, you got a heart beat, You're alive.
And meanwhile, I'm looking at the dock and I'm like,
have you seen how much weight I've gained? Or have
you seen how much weight of lost? What's going on?
But what you're saying, Terry Poon with twin Health is
that if you can go to the doctor's office, get
synced up to the sensors. It's not again, it's not
whether it's Apollo thirteen into your doctor's office, but get
hooked up to the sensors, get the full download of
the complete picture, and for the patient to actually be
able to see, Okay, you're on this path. This is
how this path ends. And maybe it ends great. Maybe
it ends when you die when you're one hundred and
seventy five years old, God bless Or maybe it's like, hey, keV,
stop smoking so many cigars, you know, because it's messing
with your lungs. And I'll say, doc, at least once
a month, that's all I need. Let's have a little
But you could see the details. That's preventative healthcare.

Speaker 2 (09:14):
That's exactly right. What we want to do is really
empower people to advocate for their own health. You know,
ultimately it's about the choices that you make. So we
don't say to our members, hey, you have to eat
salad every day, and you know, for us, like it's
really it's really choices, right, So we think that we
can understand our members' goals and then have the Digital
Twin guide them towards the goals that they want to
achieve while still having a great life.

Speaker 3 (09:42):
You know, it's not one or the other.

Speaker 2 (09:45):
You can have great health and also a great life,
and you know, we think that Digital Twin is able
to do that at an end of one like really
individualized level. That's part of what we see in our
members is that we're able to help them normalize pleasure
and also lose weight. And what they tell us is
that you know, they're getting more energy and better sleep,
and you know they're having like more fun with their
kids because suddenly they have their energy. Now, they can
go hiking, you know, they can do things that they
didn't have the energy to do in the past.

Speaker 1 (10:14):
So how often can you check the results.

Speaker 2 (10:17):
Our sensors measure the data continuously every minute, and then
we provide that to our members in an app that
they check every day. So it's really a personal companion
for help.

Speaker 1 (10:30):
So the sensors are do you put them on your skin?

Speaker 3 (10:32):
Like?

Speaker 1 (10:32):
How does that work?

Speaker 3 (10:33):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (10:34):
So it's a combination of a watch that's measuring your
heart rate, your sleep, your stress, your activity, along with
a continuous cool post monitor. It's like a patch that
you wear that measures your blood sugar and then also
body composition scale. We have members stepping on it once
a day or once a week depending on their condition,
and then a.

Speaker 3 (10:56):
Blood pressure meter. So pretty easy to do. You know,
our members all the time.

Speaker 1 (11:01):
That's really cool for diabetes. This must be a total
game changer.

Speaker 3 (11:04):
Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 2 (11:05):
So you know what we see is the clinical results
that we've achieved are very good. So more than seventy
percent of our members were able to normalize their blood sugar.
We did a study that was published in the New
England Journal of Medicine.

Speaker 1 (11:21):
I saw that, right, that's the big study that just
came out.

Speaker 2 (11:23):
Yet, keep God absolutely, So you know what we did
was over about two years, we did a study with
the Cleveland Clinic where we really wanted to, you know,
study for real patients how the digitation can help them.

Speaker 3 (11:38):
So we found great results there that we just publish.

Speaker 2 (11:42):
And we found that we were able to normalize blood
sugar and more than seventy percent of people, like I said,
and also we were able to achieve an average or
of twenty seven pounds of weight loss, so all naturally
while coming off of medications.

Speaker 3 (11:57):
So we're quite.

Speaker 1 (11:58):
Happy with that. Fascinating right, Well, thank you so much
Terry Poone for this fascinating conversation, just on how digital twins.
You know, and people always ask me why do you
want to go to space and come back so much?
And the technology that was literally used in the Apollo
thirteen mission that's saved brave patriots lives truly when the
oxygen tanks exploded. Yes, that same technology is now being
applied to saving lives of diabetics. It's reality, folks. And
so when I talk about wanting to go to Mars,
when I talk about wanting to go to Jupiter's moons,
when I talk about wanting to go in a deep
interstellar space, it's because it will make life better for
humans on planet Earth. Don't believe me, ask my digital
twin that does it for me. Thank you so much
to Terry Twin. Remember you can listen to all of
the Way to Hello future episodes on the iHeartMedia app.
And have a great tomorrow Today