Hu, Shanshan

Background

After changing its name from Facebook to Meta, the term „metaverse“ became a popular addition to the dictionary of technology commentators and academics. Organizations believe that the potential to transform their extant business models to function on the metaverse is significant. Among others, patients and healthcare professionals could benefit from metaverse by implementing innovative elements to improve access and experiences of healthcare services, like real-time monitoring of individuals’ behavior change or remote psychiatric group therapy. First studies exist that aim to investigate the impact of metaverse on current health practice, especially by using interactive VR technologies and digital twins to increase levels of immersion. Nevertheless, it remains unclear to what extent metaverse has been considered by participants and researchers to improve healthcare and what the main opportunities and challenges of adopting current healthcare services in metaverse are. Reasons for this include the relatively nascent state of the metaverse, the rapidly increasing number of points of view, and the inconsistent use of terminology. An analysis of the temporal development of metaverse in healthcare could shed light on already proposed improvements and help researchers to identify the current state of this topic and develop a research agenda. Moreover, it could provide practitioners with an overview of the extant propositions for healthcare in the metaverse and support organizations in improving these propositions or exploring new ideas.

Objectives

This is an umbrella topic since topics of interest change rapidly. A specific topic will be selected during the first meeting. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

- Review of applications, frameworks, or other related propositions for healthcare in the metaverse

- Experimental design on the effects of a specific design element (e.g., Avatar) in the metaverse for health-related purposes

Introductory Literature

- Dwivedi, Y. K., Hughes, L., Baabdullah, A. M., Ribeiro-Navarrete, S., Giannakis, M., Al-Debei, M. M., ... & Wamba, S. F. (2022). Metaverse beyond the hype: Multidisciplinary perspectives on emerging challenges, opportunities, and agenda for research, practice and policy. International Journal of Information Management, 66, 102542.

- McKinsey & Company (2022). Value-creation-in-the-metaverse: The real business of the virtual world. https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/growth-marketing-and-sales/our-insights/value-creation-in-the-metaverse

- Park, S. M., & Kim, Y. G. (2022). A Metaverse: Taxonomy, components, applications, and open challenges. Ieee Access, 10, 4209-4251.

- Thomason, J. (2021). MetaHealth-How will the Metaverse Change Health Care?. Journal of Metaverse, 1(1), 13-16.

- Ning, H., Wang, H., Lin, Y., Wang, W., Dhelim, S., Farha, F., Ding J., & Daneshmand, M. (2021). A Survey on Metaverse: the State-of-the-art, Technologies, Applications, and Challenges. arXiv preprint arXiv:2111.09673.