Towards the application of digital twin in the research and development of sport footwear

The concept of Digital Twin (DT) was firstly proposed by Grieves in 2003 to introduce the Product Lifecycle Management (PLM), that each physical product shall develop a digital representation before real manufacturing in the industry (Grieves, 2014). While entering the period of industrial 4.0, a main approach is the smart manufacturing, thus the DT has been widely used and investigated in the academic research and industrial application. Recently, the technology of DT was used in the healthcare-related application (Miller & Spatz, 2022), such as the medical monitor, orthopaedics evaluation and physical activity intervention. While considering the application of smart DT approach into the Research and Development (R&D) of sports footwear, the digitisation of a footwear prototype in a virtual space may be a first step, throughout a complex optimisation process of computation (the pressure-comfort prediction, mechanical calculation, Finite Element simulation, shoe prototype modification and optimisation etc.) (in the second step), and a third step of shoe manufacture.