Digital twins are exciting to many in health care who see the use of technology as beneficial in servicing patients, facilitating precision medicine, and maintaining personal health. However, they also raise a number of ethical concerns about accessibility, cost, privacy, and benefit to user.
Personalised health monitoring, maintenance of electronic records, and stored patient data banks all have a carbon footprint. Therefore, best estimations between DT infrastructure and parallel services that have a LCA attached to them—or life cycle thinking—is one approach to understanding the possible environmental footprint of DT. For instance, one outpatient appointment emits 50 kg of CO2 equivalent; DT would add to these carbon emissions when they are used in both outpatient and inpatient services.
A carbon number assigned to a procedure does not account for other ethical aspects of health care, carbon emissions, or health care delivery like distributive justice and is therefore morally reductionistic. Hence, principles for sustainability, ecological wisdom (reduce; reuse; recycle), and individual action are likely to be needed in making DT more sustainable as society awaits more carbon data.
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