In a demonstration of digital healthcare technology, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) has created a digital twin of a para-athlete’s heart.
This is part of the IT giant’s Future Athlete Project, a look into the future of healthcare and sports analysis as the convergence of digital advancements and more affordable price points make personalised healthcare monitoring a mass market reality.
The project has seen the company create a digital twin of the heart of para-athlete Milly Pickles, which through sensors and artificial intelligence (AI) monitors her heart during training sessions.
Pickles, 29, had her right leg amputated from the knee down and lost two toes, including her big toe, on her left foot – or “human foot”, as she describes it – after being electrocuted when she was 20 years old.
She is aiming to complete the London Marathon in under four and a half hours next year, and is harnessing digital healthtech to reach her goal.
Using sensors and artificial intelligence, TCS provides personal insights after Pickles’ training sessions.
New target
While not a professional athlete, Pickles said she has “always been super sporty” and wanted to get back to running after her horrific accident.
Her marathon goal came after, in 2023, she became the first amputee to complete the gruelling Red Bull 400, described as the world’s steepest 400m race, which sees runners climb a ski jump.
After watching a video of the event, she decided she would do it. “Because it scared me when I saw the video, I thought, ‘I have to do it’,” said Pickles. “Once I got to the top, it really instilled this self-belief within me. And it was a reference point that I could do hard things,” she said. “I thought, ‘what’s the next thing?’ So, obviously, the London Marathon.”
The London Marathon meant a huge step up in distance at 42km. The longest she’d run at the time of making the decision was 3km. “It was a real big jump, so the training was challenging, because it was all very new to me,” said Pickles.
The importance of getting her training right was made clear after her first marathon. She ended up in a wheelchair for three weeks after a half marathon during training. When she did her first marathon, she got to about 31km and was forced to walk the remainder after a cut on her “human foot” began to bleed heavily, and she was advised to stop.
Pickles has done a second marathon, but injury forced her to walk some parts. But as determined as ever, she is aiming for a four and a half hour marathon in London 2027, and will run an 8km section of this year’s event as part of her preparation.
Pickles told Computer Weekly that she needs highly personalised advice when it comes to running due to her physical challenges. “You hear people online saying, ‘you should do this, you should do that’, and it’s hard to know exactly what to do, so having this personalisation is great,” she said.
“With the two marathons, for example, I was struggling with my recovery, and I was just feeling really tired and I didn’t understand why,” said Pickles. “When this project came to me, I thought, ‘this is great, because I get to actually learn more about my body and how I can recover better’.”
The tech of the future
Ved Sen, head of Innovation at TCS in the UK, told Computer Weekly that Pickles uses wearable sensors that carry out what he described as “a consumer-grade ECG”.
“It will pick up heart rhythms, and an enormous amount of data about various readings from the body,” he said. “From a day’s data, we can analyse and have results back to the athlete in the morning to understand what was right about a training session.”
Two teams sit behind this data collection and analysis: one in California specialised on athlete-monitoring services; and a health team in India.
The insights are highly personal – for example, Pickles now knows that unlike for most people, training near bedtime does not impact her sleep.
Sen said there are many parameters of the heart and some of them are more readable, like the heart rate. “A smart watch will tell you when your heart is elevated and when it comes back to normal,” he said. “That’s fine, but it’s superficial.”
Sen added that the TCS team can look at parameters such as the expansion and contraction of the chambers of the heart and answer questions like, ‘what is the force at which it contracts and expands, and how long does it take to return to normal functioning?’
“In Milly’s case, for example, what we realised is that while a lot of the superficial parameters return to normal, and it felt like she had completely recovered from a run, there were still aspects that were less visible, which were still putting some pressure on her heart,” he said. “This might mean that rather than needing four hours to recover from a run or a training session, maybe six hours is needed.”
Pickles said: “It’s way more personalised, which is great because, for example, I’ve learned that if I don’t get enough sleep, it could tell me that I’m not ready to train. People say sleep’s important, but I feel like I’ve actually learned and understand what is happening to my body and why I need more sleep. So, I’ve started improving my sleep and having more consistent bedtimes, and I am now more willing to train.”
She said heart readings have also helped her understand how her mood could effect training.
Sen said this type of technology will support the healthcare sector’s increasing focus on the prevention of health problems. “The world of healthcare is moving from curing to prevention because that’s where the real value is,” he said.
“Our teams are asking questions like, ‘can we do digital twins of human organs?’ We could play out scenarios. Given the amount of data from any one asset or an organ, we may be able to build a model which we run and say, ‘under these conditions, this organ or this part of the body functions in a certain way, or not’.”
The data collected by the sensors and analysed through AI can help runners at all levels. TCS has also run the same project with professional athlete Des Linden, who won the Boston Marathon in 2018.
“With Milly, it’s how, as an amateur runner, can she survive the marathon without injuring herself, while with Des Linden, it’s about how to knock two minutes off a personal best,” said Sen.
Bigger picture
The tech innovation is not just about more effective training, but how the healthcare sector can use technology to prevent ill health and improve healthcare.
Sensor technology today is at a more attractive price point for wider use, while advancements in AI mean huge amounts of data can be analysed, providing the perfect conditions for the healthcare industry to adopt digital preventative medicine.
TCS’s team in California is using the technologies in care homes to monitor elderly people when they are walking, to help them understand their limitations and what exercises are suitable for them. The target is to keep elderly people mobile for longer.
Industries such as cosmetics could then benefit from digital twins of peoples’ skin, said Sen. This could, for example, allow companies to customise creams to suit particular people.
“We can analyse all the different layers of the skin under the microscope and then create a model that shows how skin behaves under certain conditions,” he said.
An additional benefit of this kind of advancement in technology could remove the need to carry out tests on animals. “That should be one of the happy outcomes of this,” said Pickles.