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.
Extract from the program on the first workshop, arranged by the Swedish society for medical genetics and genomics.
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.
