Health data: Award for Science Year format

The project “My Twin, My Rules” aims to bring questions surrounding digital patient twins into the public sphere. The idea won over the jury of the 2026 Science Year university competition.
Offenes Daten-Café: Menschen diskutieren, Infotafeln, Boarding-Post-Ideen, inklusive Barrierefreiheit.
Visualization of the data cafés taking place in Karlsruhe and Kaiserslautern in the summer of 2026. (Image: created with Adobe Firefly)

Digital patient twins are considered a key technology for the medicine of the future. They combine health data into models that can support medical decisions and personalize therapies. But what data is allowed to be collected? Who should have access to it? And how much control do we want to retain in data-driven medicine?

With the project “My Twin, My Rules – A Data Café on the Future of Health Data,” ITAS and Fraunhofer IESE are bringing these questions into the public sphere. In the university competition “Show Your Research!” in the Science Year “Medicine of the Future,” they were honored as one of ten winners from a total of 220 submissions.

At the heart of the project are mobile data cafés, which will be set up in Karlsruhe and Kaiserslautern in the summer of 2026. Visitors can design their own “digital twins” there and discuss the opportunities and risks of data-driven medicine based on concrete scenarios (e.g., “Should a digital twin inform relatives about signs of dementia?”). The goal is to create a gallery of individual “data twins” and societal perspectives on data-driven medicine.

In the project, Nora Weinberger and Dana Mahr combine their research on digital patient twins with approaches from participatory technology assessment. Jean Stadlbauer, who leads the project, and his colleague Theresa D. Ahrens from Fraunhofer IESE contribute their expertise in digital health. (24 March 2026)

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