The Role of Head-Mounted Display (HMD)-Based Meta-Apps in Advancing Healthcare

Abstract

The Metaverse is an envisioned shared virtual environment enabled by technologies, such as virtual reality (VR), artificial intelligence (AI), cloud computing, and blockchain. Head-mounted displays (HMDs) are a VR technology that provide users a more immersive and engaging experience. Consequently, there is a growing interest in exploring the applications of HMDs in healthcare. HMDs can revolutionize healthcare by providing interactive environments for medical training, remote consultations, and others. In addition, HMDs can facilitate the unobtrusive collection of health data, enabling objective measurement of emotions, activity, and other digital biomarkers that are indicators of human performance or well-being. This data can be used along with digital phenotyping to design real-time, personalized health interventions that can surpass conventional interventions. In this study, we synthesize literature review articles that examine the use of HMDs in healthcare to provide a holistic view of the current HMD-based research in healthcare and outline future research directions.