Realizing the Potential of Metaverse to Revolutionize the Future of Healthcare
Abdelraouf M. Ishtaiwi, Wa'el Musa Hadi, Ahmad Al–Qerem · 2024
The emergence of metaverse technology, underpinned by virtual reality, augmented reality, and artificial intelligence, holds profound implications for transforming healthcare. This paper reviews the current applications of metaverse in medical education and training, mental healthcare, remote patient monitoring, surgical procedures, and biomedical research. It analyzes the challenges around adopting this technology, spanning technical limitations, ethical dilemmas, threats to privacy, and regulatory gaps. Finally, it proposes strategies and future directions to harness the metaverse's potential to increase healthcare access, efficiency, personalization and democratization. This encompasses research on innovative use cases, developing ethical governance frameworks, and policy reforms to incentivize equitable metaverse adoption across the healthcare ecosystem. A nuanced, evidence-based approach can enable the metaverse to usher a new paradigm of patient-centric healthcare delivery.