Human Digital Twins: Enhancing Interactions With Digital Ecosystems

The emergence of digital twins (DTs) has transformed domains like Industry 4.0 or automotive, enabling advanced insights and predictive maintenance as well as driving efficiency and innovation. With the evolution toward human-centric domains, such as Industry 5.0 or intelligent vehicles, the need for human DTs (HDTs)—human digital representations with the aim to align human interactions with the system’s design and its performance—arises. HDTs, linked to human interactions in various contexts, seek to improve well-being, safety, and productivity by integrating human factors into digital systems. However, they face unique considerations and challenges compared to traditional DTs. We provide an overview of distributed multicontext HDTs, highlighting their utility in various domains, and propose an architecture designed to address key challenges in their development and deployment, including data management, privacy, or interoperability. Additionally, we show the development of HDTs in practical and functional environments through a set of artifacts.