AIGENT: AI generated digital twin infrastructure for healthcare & living environment

Status: Ongoing Data & AI Energy Health Environment

The AIGENT project develops a Pan-European infrastructure for AI-generated digital twins in healthcare and the living environment. Coordinated by VITO, the project enables researchers, clinicians, housing actors, city planners, and citizens to explore “what-if” scenarios without coding. By combining generative AI, secure edge processing, and European high-performance computing, AIGENT will create trustworthy, explainable, and privacy-preserving simulations that connect people and living environments.

Our health and wellbeing are shaped not only by our biology, but also by the environments in which we live: the air we breathe, the homes we inhabit, the energy systems around us, and the climate conditions we experience. Yet today, healthcare, buildings, energy, climate, and urban systems are often studied and modelled separately, even though they interact continuously in real life.

The AIGENT project, which stands for AI-GENerated digital Twin infrastructure for healthcare & living environment, addresses this fragmentation by creating a Pan-European infrastructure where digital twins from different domains can be generated, connected, and orchestrated together. AIGENT will make it possible to link, for example, a person’s healthcare twin with the digital twin of their dwelling, allowing researchers and decision-makers to test combined medical, environmental, and building-related interventions before acting in the real world.

The project combines advances in generative AI, simulation, privacy-preserving data processing, and federated high-performance computing. Through a no-code Scenario Studio, non-technical users will be able to describe questions in natural language — such as how indoor overheating affects vulnerable citizens, or how housing renovation could reduce both energy use and health risks — and translate them into trustworthy simulations.

Three-tier architecture

Technically, AIGENT is built around a three-tier architecture:

Edge Twin Nodes, which keep sensitive person and dwelling data local
the AIGENT Nexus, which orchestrates scenarios, knowledge bases, workflows and governance
the AIGENT Compute Platform, which connects to European high-performance computing resources and AI Factory infrastructures to run large-scale simulations.

This architecture is designed to ensure privacy, explainability, interoperability and compliance with European frameworks such as GDPR, the AI Act, and the European Health Data Space.

AIGENT will be validated through six pilots in Belgium, Finland and Greece: three in healthcare and three in the living environment. These include digital twins for cardiorespiratory monitoring, adverse drug reaction risk, adaptive healthy living, building energy management, neighbourhood-scale planning, and indoor environmental quality. The project also aligns with major European initiatives such as GenAI4EU, AI-on-Demand, European AI Factories, the Virtual Human Twin ecosystem, Destination Earth, CitiVERSE, and smart-building initiatives.

The consortium brings together leading research and technology organisations, universities, digital health and building experts, legal and ethical specialists, standardisation actors, healthcare networks and civil society organisations. Together, they aim to move Europe from isolated digital-twin pilots towards a reusable, trustworthy, and adoption-ready infrastructure for cross-domain simulation and decision support.

VITO's role in AIGENT

VITO coordinates AIGENT and plays a central role in turning the project’s scientific vision into an operational, regulation-aligned, and impact-driven infrastructure. As coordinator, VITO ensures that the technical development, pilot validation, stakeholder engagement, communication and exploitation activities remain aligned across the full consortium and across the healthcare and living-environment domains.

VITO brings a unique combination of expertise that is essential for AIGENT: AI safety and explainability, regulatory science, healthcare digital twin engineering, building energy modelling, smart-building innovation and living-lab validation. Through EnergyVille and its work on energy in the built environment, VITO contributes deep expertise in building performance, smart energy systems, and digitalisation of energy services. VITO’s experience as coordinator of the development of the Smart Readiness Indicator also strengthens the project’s link to European building policy and smart-building assessment frameworks.

This makes VITO particularly well placed to coordinate AIGENT: the project sits exactly at the intersection of VITO’s strengths in sustainable living environments, digital health, AI-enabled decision support, regulation-aware innovation, and European ecosystem building.

Project partners

VITO (Vlaamse Instelling Voor Technologisch Onderzoek N.V.), Belgium (RTO, project lead)
VTT (Teknologian Tutkimuskeskus VTT Oy), Finland (RTO)
FORTH (Foundation for Research and Technology – Hellas), Greece (RTO)
RISE (Research and Innovation Services d.o.o. za usluge), Croatia
VPH (Virtual Physiological Human Institute For Integrative Biomedical Research Vzw), Belgium
CERTH (Centre for Research and Technology Hellas), Greece (RTO)
i-HD (The European Institute For Innovation Through Health Data), Belgium
EHTEL (European Health Telematics Association Bruxelles), Belgium
WONCA (World Organization of Family Doctors), Slovenia
BDTA (Building Digital Twin Association), Belgium
AGE Platform Europe, Belgium
Timelex, Belgium
University of Warsaw, Poland
TU/e (Eindhoven University of Technology), Netherlands
HITS (Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies), Germany
University of Auckland, New Zealand