Metaverse for Healthcare: Technologies, Challenges, and Vision

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.