Metaverse in Healthcare Integrated with Explainable AI and Blockchain: Enabling Immersiveness, Ensuring Trust, and Providing Patient Data Security

Abstract

Digitization and automation have always had an immense impact on healthcare. It embraces every new and advanced technology. Recently the world has witnessed the prominence of the metaverse which is an emerging technology in digital space. The metaverse has huge potential to provide a plethora of health services seamlessly to patients and medical professionals with an immersive experience. This paper proposes the amalgamation of artificial intelligence and blockchain in the metaverse to provide better, faster, and more secure healthcare facilities in digital space with a realistic experience. Our proposed architecture can be summarized as follows. It consists of three environments, namely the doctor’s environment, the patient’s environment, and the metaverse environment. The doctors and patients interact in a metaverse environment assisted by blockchain technology which ensures the safety, security, and privacy of data. The metaverse environment is the main part of our proposed architecture. The doctors, patients, and nurses enter this environment by registering on the blockchain and they are represented by avatars in the metaverse environment. All the consultation activities between the doctor and the patient will be recorded and the data, i.e., images, speech, text, videos, clinical data, etc., will be gathered, transferred, and stored on the blockchain. These data are used for disease prediction and diagnosis by explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) models. The GradCAM and LIME approaches of XAI provide logical reasoning for the prediction of diseases and ensure trust, explainability, interpretability, and transparency regarding the diagnosis and prediction of diseases. Blockchain technology provides data security for patients while enabling transparency, traceability, and immutability regarding their data. These features of blockchain ensure trust among the patients regarding their data. Consequently, this proposed architecture ensures transparency and trust regarding both the diagnosis of diseases and the data security of the patient. We also explored the building block technologies of the metaverse. Furthermore, we also investigated the advantages and challenges of a metaverse in healthcare.

Mental health services in the metaverse: potential and concerns

“…The Metaverse may provide solutions to the issue of access, offering greater anonymity and overcoming geographical barriers. Those who are housebound, remote, disabled, isolated, or concerned about stigma may find care more easily in the Metaverse [8,13,14]. A single clinician may be able to amplify his or her reach through the use of avatars [4].…”

“…Artificial intelligence and wearable devices may offer lower-cost options for more independent assessment and monitoring of conditions [14]. The Metaverse may herald a transformation from information-based to experience-based mental health education, potentially improving efficacy, while immersive gamification may help promote healthy behaviour [13,15]. However, attention should be given to questions of equity.…”

A Bibliometric Study on the Rising Trends of Metaverse Literature in Asia-Pacific Countries

“…Virtual reality simulations within the metaverse offer a promising tool for medical training, enabling healthcare professionals to practice complex procedures and scenarios in a realistic virtual environment (Farahat et al, 2023). This immersive training experience allows practitioners to enhance their skills, improve patient safety, and gain practical experience before working with real patients (Ali et al, 2023). One of the signi cant advantages of the metaverse in healthcare is its ability to overcome geographical barriers and enhance access to healthcare services (Tan et al, 2022).…”

What can the metaverse do for urology?

“…Big Data are of great commercial interest for big tech companies and people have limited power in controlling what data are they sharing, with whom and under what conditions, so a centralized regulatory oversight with international jurisdiction has long been awaited and is necessary for the implementation of the metaverse to take place quickly and transparently. 27 Some authors saw a viable solution in encrypting patient data into blockchain networks, owing to their transparency and traceability features, as for cryptocurrencies. 28 Each block in the chain is, at the same time, an independent unit containing its own information, and a dependent link in the collective chain: this duality creates a network regulated by participants storing and sharing information, rather than a third party.…”