Frontiers in Digital Health

SOMA: a preventive health governance framework for adaptive, consumer-facing digital health guidance

ReviewAI & data
Follow

Abstract

This paper introduces SOMA, a conceptual preventive health governance framework for adaptive, consumer-facing digital health guidance, designed to support everyday preventive health self-governance. Non-communicable and lifestyle-sensitive chronic diseases account for the majority of global mortality, yet existing consumer-facing digital health tools rarely provide coherent, governed preventive guidance that integrates multimodal personal health data, scientific evidence, user-defined goals, real-world feasibility, relational support, and explicit safety constraints within a unified architecture. SOMA conceptualizes preventive health self-governance as the iterative, user-governed process through which individuals interpret their evolving health state, define goals and feasibility constraints, receive evidence-informed guidance, and act within boundaries that reduce the risk of unsafe or inappropriate digital health guidance. The framework theorizes an architecture of five interdependent components: a Digital Twin Core synthesizing a multimodal Health State Vector across biological, wearable, subjective, behavioral, and contextual layers; a Scientific Intelligence Core evaluating evidence quality, uncertainty, and applicability; a Relational Avatar Core supporting disclosure, trust calibration, and user-facing communication; a Personal Health Governance Profile embedding user-defined goals, feasibility constraints, and autonomy preferences; and a Continuous Learning Engine updating the model based on outcomes, evidence, and user feedback, all bounded by non-negotiable Safety and Medical Escalation Boundaries. The theoretical contribution lies in integrating previously siloed approaches (digital health twin logic, evidence-weighted scientific intelligence, relational guidance, behavioral self-governance theory, and personal health governance) into a unified preventive architecture whose governance properties emerge from the structured interdependence of its components. Five testable hypotheses are derived from the architecture to guide a staged empirical validation programme. SOMA is a conceptual framework that has not been empirically validated and makes no claims regarding clinical effectiveness, disease prevention, or deployment readiness.

The paper

Bratislava University of Economics and Management

Frontiers in Digital Health, 22 Sep 2026, Open access

doi.org/10.3389/fdgth.2026.1902578PubMed 42840112