Login
Development of a Hospital-at-Home Digital Twin for Patients With Frailty: Scoping Review
Background: Increasing demand on healthcare systems requires innovative and transformative solutions to deliver efficient, high-quality care. One promising approach is Digital Twin (DT) technology, which leverages real time data to create dynamic virtual representations of a physical entity (individuals or space) to anticipate future scenarios and support care decisions. While DTs have been explored in various sectors, their application in Hospital at Home (HaH), which delivers acute level care in home environments, remains unexplored. Objective: This review bridges a critical knowledge gap and examines the existing evidence on DT-enabling tools for managing patients with frailty in home settings. This will identify the underpinning architectural components required to inform a HaH-DT system which can support clinical decision-making. Methods: Six electronic databases (Embase, MEDLINE, Cochrane CENTRAL, CINAHL, Web of Science and Scopus) were searched, along with grey literature, to identifying primary studies published in English, between January 2019 and September 2025. Included studies had to report on the monitoring or management of patients with frailty within their own home, and information was charted on a pre-defined data collection form to answer the research objectives. Review articles, protocols, and conference abstracts were excluded. Results: Sixty-nine reports were included, of which 54% (n=37) used quantitative approaches, and 36% (n=25) were pilot or feasibility studies. Reports were analysed for DT-enabling tools and systematically mapped across the proposed five-layered DT architecture: sensing, communication, storage, analytics, and visualisation. Taxonomies of DT layers, their interconnections, and the classifications of the types of data collected (e.g., about the patient, the home environment, the use of medical equipment) are presented. This evidence identifies DT-enabling tools used for a variety of functions and a range of sensing technologies that exist (e.g., passive sensing via wearables, active physiological sensors, ambient sensors to detect motion/environmental changes). The most prevalent modes of communication were wireless and network-based (n=36), with the majority using Bluetooth (n=12). This review highlights better understanding of data management, in particular secure storage, is required within local healthcare systems. The emerging potential of predictive and prescriptive analytics, which can enable clinicians to predict risk, support clinical decision-making, or activate alert-triggered health interventions were mapped. Existing evidence suggests analytics methods are currently largely descriptive with a lack of advanced methods such as prescriptive analytics to enable recommendations of an optimal course of action, and the absence of diagnostic analytics which can highlight why a situation has occurred. Reported DT-enabling tools demonstrate patient-centered benefits, including enhanced motivation, reassurance, and personalised care. However, concerns persist regarding device accuracy, user acceptability, and implications for carers and organisational workflows. Conclusions: This review is among the first to systematically map DT-enabling tools to inform a potential HaH-DT in patients with frailty and organised by a 5-layered conceptual model. Understanding these architectural layers provides the foundations to enable stakeholders advance research and development in areas where there are knowledge gaps and consider how a HaH DT can effectively operate within current healthcare systems. By leveraging technology-enabled care in complex home-based settings, there is great potential to deliver safer, personalised and timely care.
