What is the Metaverse?
The augmented virtual environment, known as the Metaverse, can be seen as a fusion of virtual and real space. The Metaverse is essentially the Internet in three dimensions. This is where users can interact with simulations of the real world or create new planets outside of it.
It is important to consider whether the Metaverse can also be applie to healthcare if we assume that some or all aspects of our “ordinary universe” can be reflect in the Metaverse. According to an Accenture report, more than eight in ten healthcare leaders believe the Metaverse development will benefit the healthcare industry. The report even calls Metaverse the “next horizon” in healthcare and predicts that the Metaverse market could be worth $5.37 billion by 2030.
How exactly will the Metaverse affect the healthcare industry?
Metaverse can already be use in healthcare in several ways, including education, surgery, patient experiences, and digital twins. Let’s look at two areas of learning and digital twins that may be the most common.
Medical professionals and students can train anywhere in the world thanks to the emergence and widespread adoption of cloud gaming technologies, virtual reality (VR) in medical education, and augmented reality (AR) in surgery. Together or with a computer-generated patient, they could practice procedures. The same virtual learning facilities use by students at prestigious medical schools and teaching hospitals can be made available to medical students studying in remote areas.
The benefits of learning across the Metaverse include much higher-resolution simulations of human anatomy. Higher levels of procedural sophistication and opportunities for seamless collaboration between centers of excellence, enabling the development of new advanced surgical procedures on photorealistic models. Real patients.
Even the way Emergo by UL tests new devices and conducts research is subject to change. One day, the Metaverse may help us reach, for example, hard-to-reach patient populations. This may allow us to observe a participant’s device usage in various contexts, configurations, and scenarios within a single test session.
Now we come to digital twins. Based on all current data and any future data that becomes available, your digital twin is an accurate digital representation of your health, not just your metaverse avatar.
Digital twins can display a significant amount of patient scan data (such as MRI, CT, and ultrasound) collected over time and displayed in a single medical view. This can show an accurate digital representation of the patient and how the patient’s physiology has changed over time using older scans. Hospital systems, entire hospitals, and prototypes and replicas of the human body are often already in use. You can now use Babylon Health’s digital twin to understand better your current health and how it might change. This digital twin uses data from wearable devices, app ratings, and medical records.
Using a digital twin, the doctor can visit the patient in the future for a routine checkup to show her how the procedure will be perform or help him understand how her lifestyle can affect her body’s health.
What will happen next, and when can I go to the “Metaverse Hospital”?
While expected to be widespread and influential, the Metaverse’s brilliant and ubiquitous virtual reality is still a long way off. There are still challenges to overcome to integrate various technologies into a single continuous world. Here are some possibilities to think about while this is happening:
- Trick or user experience? Think about how the user can benefit and how patient outcomes can be improve by implementing metaverse features. Think about your goals for the Metaverse and how you can use them to solve the problems at hand.
- Plan services to complement each other and not become a conflict of competing worlds and systems that users must now manage independently, keeping in mind how the Metaverse will integrate with existing systems in the healthcare software industry.
