Human Digital Twin-based interactive dashboards for informal caregivers of stroke patients

Abstract

Informal caregivers (i.e., family and friends) play a vital role in the care of stroke patients during at-home rehabilitation but often face significant challenges due to lacking medical experience and insufficient professional assistance. Human Digital Twins, i.e., digital representations of the patient, could help address this challenge by monitoring the patient's condition via sensors and communicating it to the caregivers through corresponding user interfaces. However, existing user interfaces in stroke rehabilitation primarily focus on the interaction between patients or therapists. This paper proposes a novel dashboard designed explicitly for informal caregivers in upper-limb stroke rehabilitation. The dashboard supports easy-to-understand communication of complex patient data and provides tools to involve informal caregivers in the patient's therapy process. Feedback from semi-structured interviews with informal caregivers validates the critical need for corresponding user interfaces but also raises questions concerning the design of visualization and data privacy.