Digital Humans as health providers
Christophe Jauquet
Author, Professional Speaker and advisor on "How #Healthusiasm Shapes the Future of every industry." --> Founder of the HealthusiasmLAB = The future of patients and health consumers.
Welcome to “A Healthusiasm World”, a newsletter by Christophe Jauquet on making customers healthy & happy.
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Digital World
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In earlier newsletters, I’ve written about the Medical Metaverse, the physical embodiment of what we’ve known as the Internet. In that trend report, I briefly shared my early thoughts on the potential opportunities for health & self-care. In this newsletter, we go back to the digital world, but this time around we’ll focus on the Digital Humans in that world.
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Digital Humans
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Digital humans sound unreal. Obviously, they are unreal, of course. But there is something about Digital humans that makes you say to yourself: this is not really happening, isn’t it? But it is happening. In fact, I expect you to be speaking to a Digital Human in the 6 next months if you haven’t already. Because Digital humans are real. Let me explain this to you.
Within this newsletter, I want to explain how this evolution impacts our health and well-being. I’ll elaborate on some of the future roles they will play in health & self-care. Along the way, I do expect you to be flabbergasted by some examples. That’s ok. But I will make sure it is not because I’ve shared the most eccentric examples, but rather by the impact some ‘normal’ examples already popular today.
What are Digital Humans?
Now, I must say that the digital world is growing at such a neck-breaking pace that it is difficult to establish a definition before technological conditions have changed again. That’s why you won’t easily find one single definition on the internet. Digital humans are often still defined as computer-generated moving images of a human being, used mainly in games or in movies as an extra in large crowd scenes.
That’s a very narrow definition. I think we can do better today. For the sake of this newsletter, let me provide you with my definition of Digital humans by sharing the visual representation here below.
Digital Humans are part of a larger group I call Digital Beings. After all, looking around in the virtual world, you quickly realise that many avatars don’t look human. But in this trend report, I won’t elaborate on these non-human-like digital beings. It’s not that they aren’t of use in health & self-care, of course. They are just not the focus of this report.
It’s all about Digital Humans here. But I will split them up into two categories to make things easy: Digital Doubles and Virtual Humans. The main difference is that Digital Doubles are considered some digital version of a real human being, while Virtual Humans are unique to the virtual world. Intrigued already? Let’s dig into it.
The trend report has turned into a long read of +3000 words. This might be a little too long to publish on Linkedin. But here's the content table that guides you to go straight to the related part of the document. Each part contains more explanation, visual examples and some thoughts its application in health & self-care setting.
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From the Context Analysis I've done, I believe the use cases for Digital Humans in health & self-care will be obvious. They provide access, advice, coaching and companionship.
With the newsletter, I hope to have provided you with a ton of examples of how Digital Humans are becoming a reality very fast. The question might be on how to get started with these. What are the early steps you can take right now? Well, there are plenty. Perhaps even too much to sum up right here. But in the newsletter, I did share three great references in case you want to take some Digital baby Human steps. (see here: The Healthusiasm Take )
Enjoy the reading. And let me know what you think about the prospect of Digital Humans in Health & self-care.
Yours,
-Christophe-
keynote speaker on trends in health & self-care
Director / Co-Founder Flutters and Strutters (FibroFlutters and ZebraStrutters)? Patient Advocate and Patient Speaker, Patient Author and Researcher, Patient reviewer of Plain language Summaries of Publications.
2 年I do however think that digital twins for people with complex medical histories... such as myself is a good idea!
Director / Co-Founder Flutters and Strutters (FibroFlutters and ZebraStrutters)? Patient Advocate and Patient Speaker, Patient Author and Researcher, Patient reviewer of Plain language Summaries of Publications.
2 年Interesting as I often say that I need to clone myself, but also rather disturbing, and creepy. A digital version of myself could be beneficial indeed! However, regarding digital human version of doctors > I’m not sure about having doctor appointments with a digital version of my doctor. The issue for me is that any form of ‘bot’ or avatar cannot be possibly fine tuned to answer everything, especially in the unpredictable world of medical health and patients. Saying that a digital version of my doctor might be a vast improvement by comparison to my live one. A digital version of my doctor is surely less likely to misinterpret me, or undermine my long term experience and knowledge of living with my health conditions. Recognise that if I am requesting an appointment that there is a new problem to address. If the digital doctor was just for basic questions regarding symptoms and getting basic info then ok. There are already bots doing this as you say. For real time consultations…. Unsure what my community members would think about that?! Maybe a poll is a good idea?! So, I sit on the fence with this one Christophe Jauquet I’ve probably watched to many scary movies!