Safety of patients is of highest importance in healthcare. It has shown to be challenging to design effective and safe IT systems for healthcare that fulfill the goal of facilitating provision of high-quality care. To prepare systems for implementation and procurement, sufficient verification and validation and thought-through requirement specifications is of highest importance. This also requires access to high quality data. A new complementary method to traditional development of products, tools and systems is virtual tests in digital sandbox environments with simulated health care processes and synthetic data.

Access to relevant, high-quality data can be challenging and usage of real data should be done with respect to integrity, confidentiality and security for the patients. To avoid unnecessary use of sensitive data, simulations on synthetic data that mimics the statistical properties of real-world data can be utilized. Synthetic data includes minimal traces to the real data which lowers the possibility to link data to individuals. Digital sandbox environments enables for developers to test and modify innovations in

collaboration with clinicians and other stakeholders, try out different features or combine them with other related innovations.

The Care@Distance group at Chalmers University of Technology performs research on digital solutions for healthcare. Their focus lies in improving prehospital care pathways by introducing new innovative methods for increasing precision in all decisions using Artificial Intelligence (AI). The group is now developing a concept and solution for simulation and testing of digital tools for healthcare.

In this session we will describe Virtuality, a concept for virtual testing using synthetic data, digital sandbox environments and third-party applications to simulate health care processes. The concept enables early testing of digital systems and tools in a safe environment, allowing stakeholders from both academia, industry and public service to research, develop and prototype systems and tools before implementation. Virtuality helps with aspects such as addressing regulatory compliance, reduce development costs, getting rid of bugs before going into clinical trials and perform testing before real data is accessible.The aim with the concept is that a broad group of practitioners should be able to use and benefit from the virtual environment and simulation of healthcare scenarios, without requiring complex programming from the users.

Authors: Fanny Apelgren ¹, Mattias Seth ¹, Hoor Jalo¹, Bengt Arne Sjöqvist¹, Stefan Candefjord¹

1) Department of Electrical Engineering, Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden