Applications of Digital Twins in the Healthcare Industry: Case Review of an IoT-Enabled Remote Technology in Dentistry

Abstract

Industries are increasing their adoption of digital twins for their unprecedented ability to control physical entities and help manage complex systems by integrating multiple technologies. Recently, the dental industry has seen several technological advancements, but it is uncertain if dental institutions are making an effort to adopt digital twins in their education. In this work, we employ a mixed-method approach to investigate the added value of digital twins for remote learning in the dental industry. We examine the extent of digital twin adoption by dental institutions for remote education, shed light on the concepts and benefits it brings, and provide an application-based roadmap for more extended adoption. We report a review of digital twins in the healthcare industry, followed by identifying use cases and comparing them with use cases in other disciplines. We compare reported benefits, the extent of research, and the level of digital twin adoption by industries. We distill the digital twin characteristics that can add value to the dental industry from the examined digital twin applications in remote learning and other disciplines. Then, inspired by digital twin applications in different fields, we propose a roadmap for digital twins in remote education for dental institutes, consisting of examples of growing complexity. We conclude this paper by identifying the distinctive characteristics of dental digital twins for remote learning.