Health, the new frontier of the metaverse?

Digital health is booming, a phenomenon reinforced by the health crisis: teleconsultations, online patient monitoring apps, artificial intelligence for diagnosis… Now added to this is the metaverse, this developing virtual world, which affects mainly games or festive events such as concerts.

Already, pharmaceutical laboratories have started. The American Pfizer has thus created Hemocraft, a kind of online game in which young hemophiliacs learn to manage their treatment. Recently, an American brand of aligners for teeth, Invisalign, offers an interactive dental office in the metaverse, to bring the avatars (or rather their real alter egos) “to learn more about the product so as to start a conversation with a dentist or orthodontist”.

In France, the Champs-Élysées clinic, a posh establishment of aesthetic medicine with a strong presence on social networks, has chosen to organize its first day in the metaverse this fall, on the theme of treatments for obesity.

That day, a few dozen avatars attend online conferences. In the virtual room, they find themselves – some more concentrated than others – in front of the lecturers who have come to present the possible procedures to them.

The goal: to allow patients who would not dare to push the doors of the clinic in the real world, to get informed, sitting quietly behind their computers.

The goal isn’t groundbreaking, but the potential applications may go beyond just raising awareness. In Paris, medical professors Boris Hansel and Patrick Nataf plan to launch a university degree dedicated to the metaverse in health, in March 2023.

“No gimmicks needed”

“The metaverse is an incredible opportunity”enthuses Professor Nataf. “In terms of training in particular: surgeons located in two different countries will be able to help each other, their instruments being able to interact thanks to mixed reality”that is to say the fusion of the real and virtual worlds.

“We could imagine having a black box of our practice, like for an airplane, to be able to analyze, after the fact, what we did during a surgical operation”he explains.

“Thanks to the metaverse, we can reproduce for an individual, with all its characteristics, its [jumeau numérique]for personalized medicine”, predicts Professor Hansel, who hastens to reassure: “We will never replace the announcement of a diagnosis, or the support of the patient, by the virtual”.

For her part, Lamia Zinaï, nutritionist, who participated in the Champs-Elysées clinic’s metaverse day on obesity, also sees it as an asset: “We can imagine that in the case of a socially stigmatizing disease, the metaverse and the avatars can help patients, allow them to approach teams of caregivers who will give them access to tools for their pathology”.

If it is in its infancy, the metaverse is already attracting investors. According to a McKinsey report, investments in the sector reached 120 billion dollars in 2022. However, it raises abysmal questions, even more so in health. Including that of the public concerned, while the dematerialization of public services is already leaving part of the population on the side.

Moreover, who will regulate the use of the metaverse in health and what happens there? “It should be dedicated to medical teams and be very well supervised; young patients should not be bombarded with advertisements”believes Lamia Zinaï.

Without forgetting the crucial question of the effectiveness of the solutions that could be proposed.

“This is the first step: for now, we have to identify the needs. We don’t need to have gadgets, but specific environments and objects to be able to treat our patients”, emphasizes Professor Hansel. At the Bichat hospital in Paris, a connected health responsibility center has even been created to meet this need for evaluation.