Utilizing Digital Twins

Utilizing Digital Twins

Do you have complex human factors issues to solve for a product? Is your product development team using digital twins?

 A digital twin is a virtual model of a something that exists in the real world, be it a physical product or service. When linked directly to its real world counterpart, often via data-gathering sensors, a digital twin can diagnose problems, guide a user through a procedure, and even gather data that can lead to new solutions.

 An example of this digital/physical relationship on a large scale is GE’s virtual modeling of its wind turbines. Each turbine sends data to a virtual copy of itself, helping to model ways to increase efficiency and power output.

 Digital twins are also used during the product development process, before something is deployed in the real world, and to analyze a prototype. Its physical counterpart doesn’t need to be loaded with sensors that feed data to the cloud. The twin often simply needs to give physical access to something that exists in the virtual design environment, in our case, CAD software.

 We use this type of low-tech twin relationship when designing head-worn EEG (electroencephalography) devices. To determine proper electrode placement before ever building a physical prototype, we use a virtual human head model with precisely mapped electrode positions. With the digital twin in our CAD environment, we can design a complex EEG headset system with high confidence in the position of the electrodes.

 Thanks to HP MJF additive manufacturing, our digital twin has an exact physical copy in the real world. Trained EEG techs use the physical twin to evaluate headset prototypes. We, as the designers, use the corresponding digital twin to incorporate their feedback into our CAD model with complete accuracy.