Behaviorism rebooted as the foundation of human digital twins: A systematic review of applications in human-robot collaboration and healthcare

Abstract

Digital twin (DT) technology has recently risen to prominence as a crucial subject in research. DT can be described as the creation of a digital representation of an object, which modifies its states in response to changes in the actual object through bidirectional information exchanges. Recently, advancements in this field have led to the emergence of Human Digital Twin (HDT), which aims to create a digital counterpart for humans, encompassing their full body, body parts, tools, activities, working environments, and any issues that can be addressed through the design of its digital counterpart. In this paper, we review the literature regarding HDT by searching for articles on ScienceDirect, IEEE Xplore, and Springer Nature Link using the keyword 'human digital twin.' Our initial evaluation of the search results indicates that the literature primarily concentrates on manufacturing and healthcare. In the manufacturing sector, the main focus is on human-robot collaboration. Therefore, to provide a thorough analysis of the literature, we emphasize human-robot collaboration and healthcare. Moreover, we examine the theoretical foundations that underpin the design and development of HDT. Our review findings suggest that authors employ HDT in human-robot collaboration for five primary objectives: controlling collaborations, ensuring safety, enhancing operator well-being, establishing multi-robot collaboration, and achieving various other goals. Additionally, in healthcare, HDT is being utilized to achieve benefits such as personalized medications for patients, providing remote medical services, reflecting individuals' health conditions; providing additional information about how the human body reacts to various treatment methods; and modeling factors that influence a patient's circumstances, among others. Furthermore, we discovered that behaviorism, in its two versions—methodological behaviorism and purposive behaviorism—serves as the foundation for the design and development of HDT, with methodological behaviorism being more prominent in healthcare and purposive behaviorism being more dominant in human-robot collaboration works. Overall, our review offers a detailed presentation of the use of HDT in these domains.