Developing Digital Twins for Health Facilities in Developing Countries towards Increasing Resilience and Business Continuity

The research will tackle the issue of accurately predicting the performance of a typical health facility within a Global South country in the case of emergencies. Such emergencies, can be extreme weather events (e.g., floods) or other natural hazards (e.g., earthquakes). The main target is to size the resilience (or else recovery to normality) capacity and be able to control it in live-mode through appropriate tailored interventions.

To this end, this hard technical aspect of the research will be accompanied by a layer of interaction with local stakeholders (doctors, patients, hospital managers, community) that will allow a better incorporation of human factors within the system modelling approach. The ultimate output is a digital replica of the/a health facility, validated and tested against real-world data.

The main parts of this research consist of:

-The background review of estimating resilience for a health facility prone to long (e.g., climate change) and short (e.g., a storm/typhoon) term environmental influences -The background review of intricacies of health facilities within Global South countries

-The background review for identifying tools and options for digitally modelling a health facility's overall performance -The contribution to collecting data necessary for the digital replica validating and testing

-The devising of the architecture of the digital model that can function as a digital twin and the ultimate delivery of this model -War-gaming scenario testing of the digital twin particularly focusing on identifying good and effective practices -The interaction with a broader team of collaborators supporting this research endeavour

-The delivery of tools and papers that could impact the function of health facilities in the Global South, yielding them more resilience and capacity against