Fujitsu has developed a digital twin technology to simulate the social impact of city and local government policies. Fujitsu has already begun providing its Policy Twin platform for municipal preventive healthcare services via its Fujitsu Research Portal software testbed.

During field trials in preventive healthcare projects, the new technology has enabled the creation of policy candidates that doubled both the medical expense cost-savings and the improvement of health indicators achieved through health guidance compared to the previous year, while meeting resourcing requirements. According to Fujitsu, this has demonstrated the technology’s ability to create policies that achieve multiple objectives simultaneously, potentially shortening planning times and facilitating consensus building.

Fujitsu aims to launch a service for the healthcare and medical sector in Japan using the newly developed digital twin technology.

Fujitsu has been developing Social Digital Twin, a group of technologies that incorporate the latest insights from behavioural economics into ICT, including AI, to support solutions for complex societal challenges. This involves developing digital rehearsal technology capable of accurately recreating human behaviour on a digital twin and predicting the effect/impact of policies. Building on this digital rehearsal technology, Policy Twin employs empirical economics to pre-emptively assess the effectiveness of digitally recreated local government policies on a digital twin.

Fujitsu anticipates that using the Policy Twin for more effective preventive healthcare policy making allows municipalities to simultaneously achieve improvements in resident health, cost savings, and disease prevention, ultimately contributing to improved well-being. As the Policy Twin can also demonstrate the rationale behind the proposed policies, it can support consensus-building among diverse stakeholders and support its implementation in society. Furthermore, employing this technology across multiple municipalities is expected to lead to best practice creation, mutual referencing of policies between municipalities, and application towards the standardisation of policies.