Metaverse for Healthcare: Technologies, Challenges, and Vision

Abstract

The continuous enhancement of living conditions imposes higher requirements for medical and healthcare services. Although improved to a certain extent, there still exist critical challenges in current medical pattern, such as the shortage of medical resources, inefficient medical treatment, and limited medical technology level. The metaverse can offer a novel mechanism to address these problems in traditional healthcare domain, and thus, to enhance the quality of medical services. Generally, the metaverse is a dynamic feedback system that facilitates the collaboration and coexistence between the virtual and physical worlds. By fostering collaboration and evolution between intelligent agents in the virtual world, knowledge of this interdependence can be reconstructed in the digital realm. This allows problems existed in the real world to be abstracted and represented in the digital space, where models can be established and computational experiments can be conducted. The outcomes obtained can dynamically guide or control the execution of strategies in the real world, with real-world execution results serving as dynamic data inputs to continually update the virtual world's model. In addition, this paper summarizes the current research status of different healthcare application scenarios for metaverse, highlights the challenges and vision, and aims to inspire further research in this field. KEYWORDSmetaverse; healthcare; application scenario; key technologies; challenges; vision T he continuous enhancement of living conditions has expedited novel and urgent requirements for medical and healthcare service industry. The realistic demands for the healthcare service industry have become higher and more diverse [1] . Although improved to a certain extent, there still exist critical challenges in current medical patterns. From a social perspective, firstly, there is a shortage of medical resources. In fact, overall medical resources are in short supply. For instance, the medical treatment is inefficient, and thus, the coverage of chronic disease diagnosis and treatment management is relatively low at this stage [2] . Secondly, the level of medical technology is limited. Specifically, the distribution of medical resources is uneven in different regions, and there are variations in medical technology and capabilities, which needs more perfect technology platforms and patterns to enhance the overall level [3] . Thirdly, the pressure on cost control is huge, especially the cost control of medical insurance funds is hard, which requires technical means to improve medical efficiency and reduce the waste of medical resources [4] . From an individual perspective, firstly, the communication between doctors and patients is relatively inefficient. In fact, it is not easy and straightforward for patients and their family members to understand the principles of the disease and the surgical process, which makes them fear the operation and have low compliance with the treatment [5] . Secondly, the surgical accuracy and safety need to be...