Human-Focused Digital Twin Applications for Occupational Safety and Health in Workplaces: A Brief Survey and Research Directions

Abstract

Occupational safety and health is among the most challenging issues in many industrial workplaces, in that various factors can cause occupational illness and injury. Robotics, automation, and other state-of-the-art technologies represent risks that can cause further injuries and accidents. However, the tools currently used to assess risks in workplaces require manual work and are highly subjective. These tools include checklists and work assessments conducted by experts. Modern Industry 4.0 technologies such as a digital twin, a computerized representation in the digital world of a physical asset in the real world, can be used to provide a safe and healthy work environment to human workers and can reduce occupational injuries and accidents. These digital twins should be designed to collect, process, and analyze data about human workers. The problem is that building a human-focused digital twin is quite challenging and requires the integration of various modern hardware and software components. This paper aims to provide a brief survey of recent research papers on digital twins, focusing on occupational safety and health applications, which is considered an emerging research area. The authors focus on enabling technologies for human data acquisition and human representation in a virtual environment, on data processing procedures, and on the objectives of such applications. Additionally, this paper discusses the limitations of existing studies and proposes future research directions.

Digital Twins for Healthcare Using Wearables

“…Additionally, human digital twins are beneficial in other fields besides healthcare. Having a human digital twin of operators in industrial settings can provide useful information on safety concerns with how the operator interacts with the present machines [ 82 , 92 , 93 , 94 , 95 ]. This has also been used to simulate human–robot interactions in factories as well [ 96 , 97 , 98 , 99 , 100 ].…”

Improving digital twin experience through big data, IoT and social analysis: An architecture and a case study

“…Other papers focused on the applications of digital twins for spacecraft protection [17] , for occupational safety and health in workplaces [18] , for smart aging [19] , and for port systems [20] .…”

A Bibliometric Analysis of Digital Twin in the Supply Chain

“…Moreover, digital twin is also seen as a driver to speed up the realization of Industry 5.0 in the future [99]. [102]. Digital twin could analyze the potential areas and degree of severity of accidents and help the companies to visualize a proper floor plan to minimize the adverse effects and losses due to the potential hazards [103].…”

“…As the world is moving towards human-centric industrialization, there are also huge research gaps with the application of digital twin and deep learning, machine learning, and artificial intelligence to achieve mass personalization through intelligent transformation [100,101]. In the supply chain where all the logistics processes are interconnected and would largely impact the next step of operation, there exists a gap between digital twin applications, deep learning, machine learning, and artificial intelligence for occupational safety and health to prevent accidents and hazards for the wellbeing of the workers [102]. Digital twin could analyze the potential areas and degree of severity of accidents and help the companies to visualize a proper floor plan to minimize the adverse effects and losses due to the potential hazards [103].…”