Future of Meta-Health
摘要
This chapter makes a case for how the metaverse might impact health by first describing why it is important within the context of challenges including aging populations, limited resources, and increasing costs. In this way, it paints a picture of both potential future directions and roadblocks. It holds immersing virtual clinics, medical training advancement, patient education enhancement, therapeutic applications, and data-driven precision medicines in its future possibilities. Of course, these many advantages are balanced against the challenges posed to patient privacy, cybersecurity, infrastructure costs, and interoperability. Speculative projections see advanced virtual clinics, access to global medical expertise with personalized treatment plans, and collaborative medical research as very common a decade ahead in a Meta-Health landscape. There are many ongoing projects that demonstrate the potential of Meta-Health: from surgical training to pain management, all the way to virtual intervention for mental health and medical education simulations. Beyond these projects, paradigm changes in healthcare that metaverse will bring in will be in areas of highly personalized care, preventive medicine, remote models for healthcare, and decentralized health data control. It therefore concludes the chapter by pointing out that the full realization of the metaverse promise for a future in health will call for further ethics work, regulatory evolution, and business model innovation.