Digital Twin and User Interaction – A Systematic Review

Digital Twins (DTs) have transformed industries by enabling virtual representations of physical systems, yet user interaction with these systems remains a critical and under-examined challenge. This paper reports a systematic review, conducted under PRISMA 2020 guidelines, of 55 peer-reviewed studies published between 2019 and 2024 at the intersection of Digital Twins and user interaction. The corpus spans manufacturing, urban infrastructure, healthcare, energy, agriculture, construction and smart-home applications, and covers conceptual frameworks, technical architectures, prototypes and user-evaluation studies. The synthesis characterises included studies by application domain, DT type in the Kritzinger et al. (2018) model–shadow–twin taxonomy, interaction modality, and reported user-evaluation approach. Across the corpus we find that: (i) only a minority of studies report any form of user involvement in requirements elicitation, participatory design, or post-deployment evaluation; (ii) validated usability instruments (SUS, UEQ, NASA-TLX) are used only sporadically; (iii) immersive AR/VR interaction is the most frequently reported modality but is dominated by technical demonstrations rather than controlled user studies; and (iv) recurring, cross-domain obstacles are data overload, interoperability across heterogeneous data sources, simulation sickness, and the absence of standardised interaction and evaluation frameworks. The review proposes a research roadmap (Section 5.4) that ties each direction to a specific evidence gap: user-centric and participatory design methodologies, standardised interaction and evaluation frameworks, cross-domain research on data visualisation and interoperability, and validated advances in AR/VR to support end-user decision-making. Limitations of the review itself — including its single-primary-reviewer coding, English-language and Scopus-dominant sourcing, and narrative rather than quantitative synthesis — are discussed in Section 5.5.