How to understand the role of human in digital twins: A digital triplet concept

• This work emphasizes integrating human factors in digital twins for systems with close human interaction • A new digital triplet framework involving human factor has been developed and implemented • A use case of bionic hand is carried out to validate the proposed framework • Performance test has been conducted to evaluate the proposed technical implementation of the use case The concept of the Digital Twin (DT) has been widely discussed across various industries, including manufacturing, aerospace engineering, and civil engineering, due to its ability to offer comprehensive predictions, monitoring, and diagnoses of complex systems. While DTs have been widely adopted in fields such as production engineering, smart cities, and healthcare, human factors are still not sufficiently considered in some areas; however, the role of humans is particularly important in the context of human-centric manufacturing approach like Industry 5.0. Addressing this background, this work proposes the concept of the Digital Triplet (DT3), which extends the conventional DT model by incorporating a ’human entity’ alongside the physical and virtual entities, thereby offering a more holistic representation of human-physical-virtual system interactions. The DT3 framework is validated through a use case involving the development of a bionic hand, where a human hand (represented by a control glove), a bionic hand, and a digital hand are interconnected to form a cohesive triplet system. This example illustrates the practical application of DT3, emphasizing the importance of integrating human elements into digital twin systems to enhance their accuracy, effectiveness, and relevance in the evolving technological landscapes of DT studies.