Metaverse & Healthcare of the Future

7 min read November 22, 2022

Author: Alex Dzyuba, Lucid Reality Labs Founder & CEO

Today, we are witnessing the topic of the Metaverse moving to the next level, with discussions around the topic already reaching the World Economic Forum stage. It is no surprise, as just the Metaverse market itself is predicted by CitiGroup to hit a whopping $8 to $13 trillion as early as 2030. It is no longer just about potential vast implementation in the gaming and entertainment industries but about the creation, governance, legislation, privacy, and safety of an entirely new universe. While we already covered some of these questions in one of our previous articles, “The Seven Challenges of the Metaverse,” today we would like to dive deeper and look into the potential implementation in one of the key industries that could impact billions worldwide, in Healthcare. Thus, we decided to share some insights, visions, and predictions of how the Metaverse could be implemented in several healthcare directions for the foreseeable future. In this article, we are answering a couple of leading questions to help unravel the potential of Metaverse’s future in Healthcare.

What Are the Potential Healthcare Implementations in the Metaverse?

Healthcare would be one of the directions that can benefit significantly from the Metaverse. At this point, moving the entire institution into the digital domain seems much of a dream. Still, education, communication, promotion, training, intervention, and rehabilitation are the first to be carried over and digitized. Regarding medical training, we have seen how the pandemic pushed many educational programs to a remote setting outside the traditional existence. This change has made it more accessible and available remotely for specialists and medical students.

Integrating XR technology has allowed these practices to remain hands-on and, most importantly, safe for patients. We also expect the Metaverse and immersive Technology to revolutionize surgery, allowing to re-create fully functional ORs (Operating Rooms) in a virtual environment, giving practitioners tools that enable planning in three dimensions or remote collaboration with other specialists around the globe. We can use the Metaverse environment to help with diagnostics, as immersive devices can visualize complex information in an immersive set-up or even capture data like response time or eye focus through the worn XR devices.

What Technology Can Make the Healthcare Metaverse Happen?

Regarding the healthcare sector, we need to emphasize several technologies that will be essential for building users’ trust, expanding implementation, and global adaptation. First and foremost is the digital twin technology; here, we are not simply mimicking real-life objects and environments but recreating their 1-to-1 digital replicas, identical to real-life counterparts, with the same visual quality, capabilities, functions, usability, responses, and interactions. The real-time data enhances it; digital twin technology can recreate entire processes and model and predict possible outcomes of fundamental procedures or operations. The same goes for visual fidelity, which ought to be created having the same textures, materials, angles, light, and spatial sound as if the person is interacting with them in a real-life setting. We are not just talking about objects and environments but also the digital twins of patients that will look, act, and respond in how real patients would.

The other essential part would be to add haptic feedback that would allow specialists to practically touch and feel both the textures, surfaces, and elements of the equipment as well as the body, skin, and vital signs of the patients. The emphasis would also be on the multiplayer functionality, where specialists from any location could access and interact in the healthcare Metaverse environments together and simultaneously, regardless of their physical locations. As we cannot expect to have everyone dive into using immersive XR devices straight off the bat, we ought to build hybrid solutions that allow access to any experience from multiple devices, including AR, VR, and MR headsets, as well as the ones users today are most used to, like mobile devices, PCs and tablets. This will enable us to take remote support to an entirely new level, linking specialists in the same space regardless of their physical location.

What Other Elements Will Be Important for the Healthcare Metaverse?

Like with the currently existing AR, VR, and MR solutions, analytics, and data collection will play an essential role, as it could help track not only the specialist’s performance data but also mistakes made or moments to pay attention to for further healthcare Metaverse development. Data collection and analytics systems will play an essential role in improving the quality of education and interaction for medical specialists and care for potential actual patients. Adding a possibility to integrate an LMS (learning management system) could also contribute to improving healthcare training and educational experiences, as it would advance content creation and management, tracking and reporting, as well as make the experience more engaging for its users based on input data.

Here, we are also talking about the potential of adding more advanced content and, most importantly, having the opportunity to move it from 2D to 3D format. We will see the healthcare system adopting fast content creation and management where specialists can work with 2D images that can be easily transformed into a 3D format, bringing complex projections to life in real-time. Visualizing anything from an MRI, CAT, X-ray scan, or any other visual content will not just move into 3D. However, it will be accessible on both immersive XR devices and what we still consider as traditional, flat screens, mobile and desktop devices.

In Conclusion

The Metaverse, without doubt, will be an exciting new chapter in not just the history of the internet but in the development of medical care globally, providing countless new opportunities. At the same time, Healthcare will push the Metaverse to develop uncompromisable standards for both visual fidelity and functional precision, as well as data privacy and security. While we are still on the doorstep of its development, the potential is already vast and exciting to imagine. Like many great things, it will bring its challenges, the ones the tech community will have to unite to overcome. Nevertheless, we are up to a great start that will flourish and bloom into the next generation of communication, interaction, and hybrid existence for medical specialists and patients worldwide.

FAQ

Can The Metaverse Drive The Metamorphosis Of Healthcare?

The industry is already adopting elements of the Metaverse, including remote XR collaboration and interaction capabilities for different aspects of training, learning, and education. The further adaptation of interactive 3D environments and their growth in scale can help remove the physical and geographical borders between medical practitioners and patients, gradually transforming Healthcare into more accessible. The metamorphosis will not stop just at that. We are bound to see more elements of the Metaverse appear in Healthcare, impacting its further transformation.

Wondering How Healthcare Will Function in the Metaverse?

As the current concept of the Metaverse implies, it is remote and decentralized, with open standards and no physical borders; making Healthcare function safely and effectively in such a setting will be a challenging task to solve. While the world is still working on a unified, comprehensive vision of the Metaverse, quite a few challenges must first be solved for a fully functional Healthcare integration to be possible.

Article Last Edited 7 May 2024.

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