Ethical, Legal, and Social Issues of Metaverse-Enabled Healthcare
Kristin M. Kostick, Vasiliki Nataly Rahimzadeh · Blockchain in Healthcare Today · 2025
Metaverse is heralded by some as the next iteration of the internet. It offers three-dimensional, immersive virtual spaces, where users, represented as avatars, can synchronously work, play, interact, and transact. Initiallydeveloped within the realm of massive multiplayer online role-playing games, the metaverse now extends intosectors such as music, entertainment, retail, real estate, and, more recently, healthcare. Users engage in themetaverse using augmented reality or virtual reality (AR/VR) headsets that interoperate with other sensorydevices to integrate biofeedback and multimodal data streams.1In this article, the authors offer a conceptual synthesis and anticipatory policy analysis grounded in a narrative review of current trends reported inpublic-facing news reports as well as interdisciplinary sources from bioethics, law, digital-health policy, andscience-and-technology studies. There are seven key ethical, legal, and social issue areas for consideration inthe delivery of metaverse-enabled healthcare. We additionally issue a call to action to explore the metaversethrough a bioethics lens. The authors begin by providing a primer on the metaverse, including the variousforces shaping its development. Next, the authors describe what distinguishes the metaverse from other digital-health technologies and illustrate emerging use cases for the metaverse. We then outline what we considerthe most pressing ethical issues raised as the metaverse matures in parallel with (or in advance of) policy guidance and regulation. Finally, we conclude with a research agenda that treats the metaverse as a serious topicof normative and empirical inquiry and argue for sustained engagement from diverse user communities tosupport its ethical design and development.