Networking Technologies for Enabling Human Digital Twin in Personalized Healthcare Applications: A Comprehensive Survey
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Digital twin (DT), referring to a promising technique to digitally and accurately represent actual physical entities, has attracted explosive interests from both academia and industry. One typical advantage of DT is that it can be used to not only virtually replicate a system's detailed operations but also analyze the current condition, predict the future behavior, and refine the control optimization. Although DT has been widely implemented in various fields, such as smart manufacturing and transportation, its conventional paradigm is limited to embody non-living entities, e.g., robots and vehicles. When adopted in human-centric systems, a novel concept, called human digital twin (HDT) has thus been proposed. Particularly, HDT allows in silico representation of individual human body with the ability to dynamically reflect molecular status, physiological status, emotional and psychological status, as well as lifestyle evolutions. These prompt the expected application of HDT in personalized healthcare, which can facilitate the remote monitoring, diagnosis, prescription, surgery and rehabilitation, and hence significantly alleviate the heavy burden on the traditional healthcare system. However, despite the large potential, HDT faces substantial research challenges in different aspects, and becomes an increasingly popular topic recently. In this survey, with a specific focus on the networking perspective, we first discuss the differences between HDT and the conventional DT, followed by the architecture and design requirements of HDT. We then review and analyze end-to-end networking technologies for enabling HDT, including data acquisition, communication, computation, data management, data analysis and decision making. We conclude the paper by presenting the future research directions of HDT.
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