Future of Healthcare in New Realities
AR, VR & Metaverse opportunities for patients, doctors, and other stakeholders in the healthcare domain
Introduction
Metaverse is the digital reality that combines aspects of social media, online gaming, augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), and cryptocurrencies to allow users to interact virtually, hence creating a real-world setting to enhance the experience. Metaverse provides a plethora of possibilities in the healthcare domain to reimagine and reinvent healthcare experiences for patients, doctors, and other healthcare service providers.
For instance, telemedicine has made healthcare widely accessible and affordable. People do not have to travel long distances to connect with a doctor. Although with the increase in telemedicine and remote medical consultations through phones and video calls, the human touch to the experience of visiting a doctor in person has declined drastically. Communicating and pinpointing exact health issues to the doctor or trusting the doctor on call/text can be tough sometimes. This is where Metaverse comes in and bolsters in providing a more immersive experience, mitigating the physical gap.
The writeup answers and gives an overview of the following questions
- How are new digital realities useful for patients and doctors?
- Who are the other stakeholders in healthcare and how can they contribute to providing a seamless healthcare experience via digital realities?
- What are the limitations of new reality solutions in healthcare?
Understanding the Healthcare Domain
Healthcare is the diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of disease, illness, injury, and other physical and mental impairments in humans. Along with that, the healthcare industry provides goods and services to treat patients with curative, preventive, rehabilitative, or palliative care.
From a macro perspective, the domain includes the following sets including the healthcare receivers which are the patients and the patient’s family, and healthcare providers including the healthcare professionals, hospitals, path labs, care service providers, etc. Let’s dive deep into how metaverse can play a role for the different user groups in the healthcare domain.
Scope of Digital Realities for Patients
1. Doctor Consultations
The need for physical doctor consultations is declining day by day, with video calls, texts, conversational bots, etc making healthcare more accessible and affordable. Metaverse can create enhanced real-life settings to ameliorate the doctor-patient connection and communication hence building trust.
For example, many children are afraid of visiting the doctor, similarly, some people may find it uncomfortable talking to doctors about certain health issues. Through the personalized metaverse platform, patients can choose where they would like to meet the doctor, may it be their favorite place in the world or their favorite game environment, or a movie set that they liked. Furthermore, the doctor can also look like their favorite character with whom they would be comfortable talking and discussing their health issues.
2. Awareness, Prevention, and Care
The vital stage in healthcare is to have awareness about a particular health issue, its symptoms, or awareness on how to prevent a disorder, furthermore taking the right care during the recovery phase. Optivu supports creating awareness about surgeries and post-care.
Optivu provides a platform to remotely track patients’ progress before and after surgery, help patients set up instruments, and a mixed reality experience to visualize and understand surgery. The platform helps to rapidly share information, to better conceptualize physician-patient conversations, and help patients make more informed decisions post their surgeries.
3. Fitness and Wellness
Care is an everlasting process in the healthcare domain. Physical, as well as mental well-being, is crucial for any individual. Metaverse provides a platform to make fitness more engaging and entertaining by transporting the user to different environments, and motivating and rewarding the users for completing fitness goals.
Supernatural provides a gamified way to work out, bringing joy from cardio, meditation with music, and environments that the users prefer. Live — coaches meet face to face in virtual reality, standing next to the user, bringing them motivation and tips to fuel their progress.
Rescape helps patients and relatives dealing with pain and anxiety to escape the real world and relax, creating positive emotions and assisting in the healing process. Different solutions are curated for different user groups catering to individual needs.
Scope of Digital Realities for Doctors
1. Diagnosis
One of the biggest obstacles for the doctors during remote consultations is to examine the patient, evaluate symptoms and diagnose the health issue. Metaverse along with the state of art technologies like AI, ML can help in visualizing patients’ reports, and medical images and identifying anomalies making the diagnosis process accurate and efficient. Along with remote consultations, diagnosis in the metaverse is efficacious in analyzing complex muscles, intricate tissues, etc to identify root causes.
Elucis provides a platform for doctors to create 3D models with medical images and patients’ anatomy appears in real-time, where the users have full control over its visual characteristics, including size, color, and transparency. Users can collaborate in real-time with voice communications and create 3D models/studies that can be stored in the cloud.
2. Treatment
The crucial part post the diagnosis process is to treat the patient. Treatment may include surgeries, therapies, rehab, curative, palliative care, and many others. Following are a few examples of metaverse that can play a role in the treatment process.
a) Surgeries
In-person or remote surgeries need extreme accuracy and clear visualizations to carry out the process in a seamless way. Metaverse delineates intricate data points for doctors, elucidating the complex stages of surgeries.
Augmedics is an AR Navigation System, that allows surgeons to visualize their patients’ 3D spinal anatomy during surgery as if they had “x-ray vision. The navigation data is projected onto the surgeon’s retina using the headset. This eliminates the attention shift of referring to a separate screen for surgeons.
b). Rehab Addictions
Researchers have achieved success using virtual reality therapy to help smokers refuse the temptation of cigarettes. Patients are immersed in environments as if they were real. They can interact with people and encounter addiction triggers. Their counselors can observe how their clients would act and cope in certain environments. Patients acquire skills and ideas that can help them manage drug cravings.
c) Elderly and Palliative care
Patients who are disabled, bedridden, and elderly people with restricted movements are usually confined to a single room. Metaverse provides a platform for them to travel, socialize and move around in the virtual space-enhancing their mental health.
Rendever’s goal is to overcome social isolation for the elderly. Tools allow the patients to take a stroll down memory lane by revisiting their childhood home, wedding location, or anywhere else from their past. Provides opportunities for users to virtually leave the four walls of their community to check off bucket list items, and create new friendships through shared experiences.
3. Training
Metaverse helps in providing medical and surgical training, disaster management training, training for health workers, and many more.
Osso VR enables remote learning where surgeons, providers, and hospital staff can train together in the same virtual operating room. Multiple people can join simultaneously in a single room from anywhere around the world.
Scope of New Realities for other stakeholders in healthcare
1. Pharmacies
Metaverse drastically mitigates the need for a physical pharmacy store as it allows customers to virtually visit the metaverse store, where users can request medicines and view alternatives if required, understand the side effects through an immersive visual experience.
As an alternative to the above example, a seamless experience can be provided to the customers where medical prescriptions can be directly sent to the pharmacies after doctor consultations following which medicines can be delivered home for the customers.
2. Medical Research
Medical research involves tremendous experiments conducted in laboratories and on the human body, which may have adverse effects on the human body, animals, and even the environment. Soon, medical experiments or drug research can be conducted virtually to lessen the risk factors of the experiments. Another possibility is creating a digital twin of the human body in the metaverse to experiment and simulate the effects of particular medicine or vaccine on the human body.
3. Insurance
Medical insurance companies have a lot of medical plans with nuances catering to different users and edge cases. Gamified examples of the different insurance packages for users can be created to better understand the plans virtually.
With the advancement of AI, ML diagnosis can be predicted before symptoms as seen in the patients. In this scenario, patients can better plan their medical expenses for treatment and prevention and choose the right insurance plan accordingly.
4. Hospitals
Even though remote healthcare is increasing rapidly, we would still need hospitals or clinics for certain kinds of treatments, diagnoses, and emergencies. Virtual simulations of the hospital environments can be done beforehand to customize and create an efficient and seamless care delivery experience for the patient. Likewise, some of the opportunities for using metaverse in hospitals are as follows :
- Design customized hospital rooms for patients; a place that feels like home or a place that they like.
- Interacting with kids or other patients during medical consultations or surgeries to distract them and lessen the pain.
- Creating 3D digital twin of the hospital and using the same for training hospital staff, experimenting with doctor-patient experience in the hospital, and many more.
Limitations
Following are a few limitations of new realities in healthcare.
- With big data analytics and data stored in the metaverse, there can be concerns about patient data privacy and the risk of patient data misuse.
- In the current scenario, with the metaverse in its naive phase, the cost of technology required for using VR headsets, metaverse gears, etc is still high and is unaffordable for most people in developing and underdeveloped countries.
- Low internet speed in rural and remote areas and cannot support remote metaverse consultations.
- An increase in remote consultation and digital or physical bots providing care leads to a risk of unemployment for healthcare workers.
- Headsets do not usually address the optic issues with near-to-eye devices, and they quickly become uncomfortable after a few minutes, leading to an increase in optic issues.
- Even with advanced AI, there is still a possibility of defective diagnosis via metaverse.
Summary
With the growth of the metaverse and the help of meta-wearables and a human digital twin; remote diagnosis, treatment, and prevention are made more seamless and efficient.
Even though the metaverse is increasing at a rapid scale, we cannot solve all the healthcare problems using the metaverse. For the best possible outcomes metaverse should be used with the other technologies, products, services, and solutions in the market. While developing metaverse solutions in healthcare, one should consider all the factors revolving around the end-user, technology used as well as business limitations. It is crucial to understand the user needs so that the right metaverse solutions can be provided at the right touchpoints in the healthcare experience for all the stakeholders.
So let’s embrace this new revolution of the new realities and explore the possibilities of not only how the AR, VR & metaverse can play a role in the healthcare domain but for the betterment of humanity in general.
Check out the next article in the Meta series that dives deep into how Metaverse is useful in the Automobile domain; that explores the endless possibilities of ‘Metaverse on wheels’ and the way it’s disrupting the experience of how cars are sold, repaired, and driven.
