Designing a digital patient avatar in the context of the MyHealthAvatar project initiative

The digital avatar is a vision for the digital representation of personal health status in body centric views. It is designed as an integrated facility that allows collection of, access to and sharing to life-long and consistent data. A number of Virtual Physiological Human (VPH) communities have started the movement to this direction by creating a digital patient road-map and by supporting data sharing infrastructures. As an innovative concept, the impact of digital patient and avatar to personalized medicine and treatment is yet to be clear. This requires a focused and concerted effort in addressing various questions regarding user perspective, use cases and scenarios. This paper presents use cases and future scenarios realizing the vision for the digital avatar as well as architectural consideration for the envisaged platform.