Tomorrow Thursday, Gunnar will present an overview of our digital twins for the society SeniorNet, which deals with IT-related issues for seniors (60+). This lecture is a part of our growing initiatives towards creating a health-centric ecosystem for elders. This ecosystem will involve both these types of societies and member organizations for elders and their interests, together with traditional healthcare organizations (e.g. primary healthcare clinics, geriatric clinics, cardiology and internal medicine clinics, etc), informal healthcare actors (gyms, health coaches, yoga teachers, etc), eldercare homes (like our partner organization Norlandia), assisted living organizations, municipalities, regions, etc. At this time, I will give a glance of this growing ecosystem, which also involves our second spin-off company – Lev Skönare. I will also outline how our digital twins can help to facilitate the integration between all of these actors. All of this is a part of our big excellence cluster M4-HEALTH, which will create a new “Model for Health”, centered around our digital twins, not only for these actors related to 60+ members of society, but for all ages and actors related to health (more about this in future blog posts). I will mention also this new and very exciting initiative at this lecture. Finally, I will also mention our upstarting collaboration with the very interesting Måltidsgillet, which is a very successful initiative from Skåne, dedicated to tasty, healthy, and affordable 3 course lunches for elders, also involving lectures, healthy activities, etc. Welcome! 🙂
Program for tomorrow, taken from their home page. Link here. As you see, there is also a lecture by Åke Hultgren on smart homes, with integrated sensors, etc. This item actually also relates to projects we have on elders, and on treatment for heart failure patients in Australia.
I always loved to go from one community to another, and to build bridges and see connections between things that may seem unrelated, to some even unconnectable or irreconcilable. This Thursday, I had a day that manifested that in a fun way: by attending, and actively engaging with, two completely different workshops.
The first workshop was the annual Swedish meeting on oncogenetics (program below). Oncogenetics means that study or clinical diagnosis of cancer risks based on genetic factors. Since genetics is a strong risk factor for many cancer types, this is an important, although quite recent, clinical domain, and most regions nowadays have such clinics. At this workshop, I gave the final lecture before lunch, and talked about how digital twins can be utilized in lifestyle changes. Lifestyle changes had come up several times earlier in the morning, since underlying genetics just give a predisposition to cancer. In other words, lifestyle factors – like smoking, diet, exercise, weight, etc – add or subtract substantially from the basic genetic risk score. Therefore, lifestyle interventions are an important part of what clinicians in oncogenetic clinics talk to their patients about, and this is where our digital twins can come in. I mentioned our commonly presented example of using our twins to explain how you can lose or gain weight by changing your diet, and how weight and other altered risk factors enter into a risk model for stroke. In the same way, we could use those same simulated risk factors, and add them into a risk model for various cancer forms – and do the same simulations and interventions that we do for stroke e.g. in our EU-project STRATIF-AI.
This is me, just before my presentation, at the Swedish National workshop on Oncogenetics.
After my presentation, and after lunch, I went over to the other event I was to visit that day: the East Sweden Game Summit. This is an annual event, which is arranged by the East Sweden Game society (ESG), which is a meeting place for companies, students, scientists, designers, etc interested in gaming. The audience here is completely different to the first one, but my digital twins fit naturally in here as well. In fact, the visualization of my digital twins is done in the software Unreal Engine, which is an engine for precisely that: game development. Therefore, there was a lot of competence at this event that I am very interested in networking with, to get our visualization module to the next level. This led to some business meetings being set up already next week on this topic, and to the preliminary joining of both ESG and at least one of its companies to our newly started excellence cluster M4-HEALTH. (More on that exciting network in later posts!) Apart from this, I also had lots of interesting conversations on design and animations over dinner, where I also started to sell in an old idea of mine: to have your digital twin also enter into the games that you play, to allow you to learn about, and also work with, your health, while you play online computer games.
This is part of the overall vision of building up an eco-system for health, where you work with your health not only when you are forced to go to the doctor because something has gone wrong, but where your health is an ongoing dialogue between you, your digital twin, your body, and your future selves, no matter what you do: go to school, go to the gym, to the supermarket – or play a video game. That ongoing dialogue with your own health in a new eco-system for health is exactly the vision of the new excellence cluster M4-HEALTH.
Me arriving to the East Sweden Game Summit. During the day, there were lectures and an exhibition. The best thing for me, however, was the dinner in the evening, where I made some very valuable connections, regarding visualization and usage of my twins using gaming technologies.
The gaming industry has been a steadily growing industry for 20+ years, regardless of pandemics, financial crashes, etc. Here is one chart to illustrate this. Charts for our local region are even more impressive: it has grown from a basically non-existing industry prior to ESG in 2017, to now a well-established sector, with ~50+ companies and 100+ employees.
This is the top 10 list of most sold games right now. As you can see, Sweden is dominating this billion dollar industry, with 5 games among the top 10 most sold games.
There is a big demand to hear about our digital twins these days. Almost every week, we have been invited to give a lecture in some event, somewhere in the world. And some weeks more than one. In fact, last week, a new record was reached: 5 presentations in 25h! Here is a short description of the five presentations:
1 – Oct 14, 13.15-13.45: Joint presentation with Johan Holmsäter at Holistal’s event Health HUB. This was together with some of the most prominent health leaders in Sweden. Johan Holmsäter started the 500 000 people strong health organization Friskis & Svettis, and is arguably the single person that has made the biggest impact for the health and healthy habits in Sweden. Other important presenters were Birgitta Thörn (CEO of Holistal, and founder of e.g. the gym & health chain Itrim), Göran Adlén (the “aging backwards” guy, and a great lecturer), Anders Rosengren (a Swedish MD with lots of interesting ideas about the mentality of health, and the founder of the successful online tool Livsstilsverktyget), etc. You can read more about the event here, and at these two previous blog posts: post by me, post by Katja.
From the final panel debate. You see Johan Holmsäter to the right in an armchair, Göran Adlén to the left on stage, and Anders Rosengren to the right, also on stage.
2 – Oct 15, 10-12: General rehersal at Norlandia, in the DN house, for the big launch event of our digital twin app, to be held the week after. I had a presentation of ~25 min prepared, where I present how our multi-level and multi-organ digital twin for individuals will enter into an eHealth app, that will be given to all 3000 employees at Norlandia. More about the actual launch event (which was held on Oct 23), will come in a separate blog post.
3 – Oct 15, 12.50-13.20: Pod cast with Cambio, at the big Cambio Connect event. This podcast was broadcasted live for all attendees in the event, over lunch, and will also be sent out later in the autumn to around 1500 health care personnel.
Me, just before the podcast, with the preceding podcast behind me.
4 – Oct 15, 13.35-13.55 Presentation at the final workshop of MeDigit, a VINNOVA financed project on medical digital twins. I held this presentation online, from a corner in one of the corridors. The minute I was finished, some staff came up to me, and said that I had to “mic up” for the next presentation 🙂
5 – Oct 15, 14.20-14.35 Presentation and panel debate at the big stage at the Cambio Connect event. This was part of the last session, on AI, and wrapped up my crazy 25 hours of presentations, presentations, presentations! After this, it was time to relax a bit, and chill out a few hours at my hotel, before travelling home to Linköping again.
Picture of me at the dinner on Oct 14, in the evening. I didn’t have a lecture then, but this picture gives a feeling for the scale of the event, and the size of the big stage: it probably featured 500+ participants.
Next week, I will be in Stockholm to give presentations at some different events. First out is Health HUB, arranged by HOLISTAL, and focusing on preventive health. I am giving this presentation together with the health guru Johan Holmsäter, who – among many other things – founded Friskis & Svettis (half a million members!), back in the early 1980s. Since then, he has done many things, and one of them is corporate health. In this, he has many examples of turning around high rates of sick leave (e.g. 8% to 2%) by utilizing some of his various health programs. In the last 1-2 years, Johan, our spinoff company SUND, and a few others have jointly founded a new company – Lev Skönare – which now are rolling out a joint product: his health programs empowered by our digital twins. In this joint presentation, you will hear about both of our personal and professional journeys, as well as about the health journey “Hälsoresan”, which our customer Norlandia is about to embark upon next week.
Later in the week, on Wednesday, I will give a presentation at the event Cambio Connect. More info about that in a separate video and blog post, to be posted shortly.
September is truly a busy period in the yearly cycle of ISBgroup, and this year is no exception. We are in the middle of our main and most advanced course – TBMT42, Systems biology, digital twins, and AI – there are lots of applications with deadline now, and lots of travels. More specifically, Monday, we submitted two applications (to internal ranking for KAW, and one as coordinator), and Tuesday (i.e. yesterday), we submitted three: two to EU (also here one as coordinator) and one postdoc application. And now a couple of intensive travel days commence. Today, I have a popular science lecture at Campus US, here in Linköping (see schedule and title below). Tonight, I go to Stockholm, for a lecture at the SciLifeLab group leader retreat on Thursday, and on Friday, I give a lecture in the Food day, in Malmö. Finally, on Monday-Tuesday, next week, I am in Örebro, to present and network at X-HiDE’s annual retreat. Links and more info to these and all other public appearances in the next couple of months is available on our home page.
Today, December 6, I, Gunnar Cedersund, am giving a lecture in a workshop arranged by the Swedish Research Council (VR). The workshop deals with 3R, and this year’s focus is on one of the “Rs”: “Replacement” of animal experiments. I was invited to give a lecture, because I have received a grant from VR’s dedicated call on 3R.
So, I presented the essence of this project, with a presentation with the same title as the research project: “Scaling from microphysiological systems to humans using scalable digital twins”. The basic idea is that our digital twins for individuals can be scaled down to e.g. a two-organs-a-chip, where a little liver and pancreatic spheroid are connected to each other (Casas et al). This downscaled twin can then be used to interpret data, understand mechanisms ,and plan new experiments on the experimental level. Apart from this, the insights entered into the down-scaled twin can be used to scale the twins back up to the human level. This latter step is called translation, and it leads to the last two steps: regulatory approval and clinical implementation. I talked about all of these steps, and also about some more general issues regarding moving this forward.
In particular, I raised the importance of taking a holistic approach, e.g. by refunding the Swedish 3R-centre, the importance of making it easier to use alternative approaches, e.g. by the creation of new core facilities, and on the importance of creating new incentives and reducing barriers for individual scientists, e.g. by including the development of more realistic experimental systems as a key criteria when evaluating research grants.
I actually made a mistake in the last post, saying that that lecture – at Öredev, Malmö, Sweden – was the third and last invited lecture that week. There was actually a fourth one upcoming: in China. This time it was at an international workshop on Digital therapeutics, i.e. eHealth and apps. It was largely focused on existing technologies, i.e. not only scientists were there, but also a lot of companies with products already on the markt, as well as the Food and Drug Administration, from the US. My lecture was given online, but a partner of mine went over there in person, to also have physical meetings, and to also help set up meetings in the New York/Boston area, to which I am travelling in the end of the month.
So – four invited presentations in one week, in four different cities, across two continents. I think that is actually a personal record 🙂
Today is the third and last public invited lecture this week. This time it is down in Hyllie, which is very close to the bridge between Malmö and Copenhagen, i.e. right on the border between the Sweden and Denmark. This lecture is again on our digital twins, and this time it is in a software and AI conference: Øredev 2024. This is a “normal” conference, which is not targeting scientists, but the general public, i.e. companies and normal citizen who are interested in software development and AI innovations, etc. This is fitting, because our research is turning increasingly more towards eHealth and app development, and even towards commercial app development via our spin-off companies. For this reason, we are also nowadays actively recruiting software and UX developers, and quite generally moving into a more public phase, targeting companies and the general public as potential customers and business partners, etc.
Picture by Roland Betnér. Program and more info for the event is available here: https://oredev.org/
