Digital Practices: Introducing Social Dimension in Digital Twins

Digital Twin is one of the key components of society's digital transformation and a promising paradigm to support the development of cyber-physical systems. Currently, researchers are investigating methodologies that exploit Digital Twins as general-purpose abstractions for complex modelling and simulation. This paper explores the idea of explicitly representing the physical and social context in cyber-physical systems through dynamic digital entities. To this aim, we introduce the concept of Digital Practice as a shared (social) digital concept, highlighting how reality is not merely described by the state of physical objects (digital twins) but also by connections among them. We illustrate this concept by exploiting an assistance scenario for the elderly.