Holistic Specification of the Human Digital Twin: Stakeholders, Users, Functionalities, and Applications

TL;DR

This paper presents a comprehensive framework for the human digital twin, defining stakeholders, functionalities, and applications to guide future research and industry implementations.

Contribution

It offers a holistic specification of the human digital twin, including requirements, stakeholder analysis, and functional abstraction levels, which is novel in this emerging field.

Findings

Defined six levels of functionalities: store, analyze, personalize, predict, control, and optimize.

Identified key stakeholders and user groups for human digital twins.

Provided detailed application examples demonstrating the feasibility of the proposed framework.

Abstract

The digital twin of humans is a relatively new concept. While many diverse definitions, architectures, and applications exist, a clear picture is missing on what, in fact, makes a human digital twin. Within this context, researchers and industrial use-case owners alike are unaware about the market potential of the - at the moment - rather theoretical construct. In this work, we draw a holistic vision of the human digital twin, and derive the specification of this holistic human digital twin in form of requirements, stakeholders, and users. For each group of users, we define exemplary applications that fall into the six levels of functionality: store, analyze, personalize, predict, control, and optimize. The functionality levels facilitate an abstraction of abilities of the human digital twin. From the manifold applications, we discuss three in detail to showcase the feasibility of the abstraction levels and the analysis of stakeholders and users. Based on the deep discussion, we derive a comprehensive list of requirements on the holistic human digital twin. These considerations shall be used as a guideline for research and industries for the implementation of human digital twins, particularly in context of reusability in multiple target applications.