ArticleAI & society2026
Realising the digital twin: a thematic review and analysis of the ethical, legal, and social issues for digital twins in healthcare.
Article in AI & society, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 5 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
5 citing papers in PubMed.
- Digital Twin-Assisted Risk Disclosure in Adults Undergoing Elective Bronchoscopy: Multicenter Randomized Controlled Trial.Journal of medical Internet research · 2026Trial
- Data, Process, and Data-Driven Representations of Digital Twins in Diabetes: Scoping Review.JMIR diabetes · 2026Review
- Healthcare Digital Twins Across Scales: A Narrative Review and Five-Level Conceptual Framework.Healthcare (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Review
- Instrumentation Digital Twins in PET and SPECT Imaging: Current Status, Challenges, and Future Directions.Computational and structural biotechnology journal · 2026Review
- A survey on ethical digital twins in healthcare.Frontiers in artificial intelligence · 2026Review
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
7 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
This paper examines ethical, legal, and social issues (ELSI) associated with healthcare digital twins (DTs). Using a systematic thematic analysis, we identify key themes across ethical, legal, and social categories, as well as practical barriers to adoption and implementation. Findings reveal a range of concerns (e.g. lack of empirical validation of DT value propositions) and gaps between the promise of healthcare DTs and the reality of deploying them within existing healthcare systems. By mapping the identified barriers to the Non-adoption, abandonment, scale-up, spread, and sustainability (NASSS) framework, we seek to demonstrate how healthcare DTs require systematic assurance and capability development. We provide practical recommendations for how this can be achieved, with specified stakeholder groups, to help build trustworthy and ethical DTs with demonstrable healthcare value. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s00146-025-02833-6.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.