Indian healthcare landscape and the Metaverse can be the future for the world. The latter is the oncoming pinnacle of human technology, while the former is a surging human resource for various technologies in the world. It seems India will be the major country to enter the Metaverse in all shapes and forms.
What is the Metaverse?
In its simplest forms Metaverse is a collection of 3D virtual worlds. The Metaverse is the successor to today’s Internet particularly after the launch of 5G in India. It’s like how the Internet emerged in the 1990s, Metaverse will evolve into a full blown entity with an array of alternative realities with unexpected possibilities and psychological effects. The Metaverse will change in realtime how humans interact with technology, with one another, and with the world.
Why does the Metaverse in Healthcare matter?
Metaverse can take over the global healthcare economy at a comparable rate and in a similar timeframe as that of digitally enhanced healthcare of today and its footprint is everywhere. If going digital was a big shift, this next one would be even bigger due to the increasing criticality of technology to economic activity and one can expect Metaverse to generate trillions of dollars in value and tens of millions of new jobs. Metaverse will probably reshuffle the world health order, among both the corporate world and governments and opens up an opportunity for India. Virtual worlds comprising the Metaverse will exist at a massive scale, being able to track millions of entities or more across the Globe.
What is the role for India’s healthcare sector in the Metaverse?
With a strong demand and bandwidth of Indian healthcare with its human resources India is best positioned to get rewarded handsomely once it refocuses exclusively on technologies that shape the future of various technologies. These worlds will have the ability to let tens of thousands of patients and their healthcare professionals to interact with one another at the same time concurrently.
The Metaverse in Medicine uses technologies like Internet of Things facilitated by AR and VR glasses with AI supported by various Medical Devices and quantum computing along with robotics to provide remote and refined healthcare. There can be various aspects like digital twinning, blockchain technologies etc. Digital twinning can increase our ability to map and understand individual genes, blockchains encrypt databases and ensure security. Telemedicine consultations through VR could create entirely new channels for delivering care that have the potential to lower costs and vastly improve patient outcomes without any geographic restrictions.
What can be Metaverse use cases for Health Industry?
- Medical Education & Skills training: Covid-19 introduced ‘Zoom School’, but we now realized it couldn’t replace presence in the classroom. However, this can soon change with Metaverse and its Immersive virtual reality experience with expert lecturers from around the world. This could change how medical education and skills can be shared from across the World. The Metaverse can facilitate high-quality training is a vital ingredient for productivity and excellence for Health care professionals and medical staff. Such training is effective while offering substantial time and cost savings.
- Medical Tourism: Telemedicine has taken up in the COVID era through Zoom calls without any immersive technology. With the Metaverse and its 3D videos and immersive VR, this sector can see no barriers in scaling up across borders.
- Medical Imaging: Radiology imaging will obviously benefit from the metaverse immersive visual capabilities, unleashing new capabilities in radiology and with automated processes supported by AI/ML. We are witnessing these in interpreting retinal imaging and predicting premature deaths from heart attacks. Similar precision in cancer care is taking place which is only bound to improve with metaverse.
- Interoperable: Virtual worlds in the Metaverse will all speak to one another. Practically that will play a pivotal role in enabling interoperability between various aspects of health care from the present use of robotics in surgeries remotely to unimaginable advances in addressing health care needs of human race. The Metaverse is expected to be an effective tool to help perform complicated surgical procedures and enhance patient care. As surgical procedures were already using robotics, now complicated surgeries are all set to use AR. And for efficient diagnosis using tech such as smart glasses are in the pipeline.
