DOCSF22: Hospitals in the Metaverse

In this episode, Shafi Ahmed, Chief Medical Officer, and surgeon at the Royal London Hospital for the NHS, presents what has been the arrival of the metaverse to the healthcare industry.  Thanks to 5G and Virtual Reality technology, there are many possibilities and opportunities for healthcare that are starting to pop up. We might be looking at the dawn of a brand new hospital experience within the metaverse. We’re now entering a Web 3.0 era, converging the digital and physical worlds seamlessly.  Blockchain technology, NFTs, machine learning, and AI will bring forward new ways to share data securely, opening a lot of doors for many industries. Shafi explains why more connectivity is needed to allow something closer to the Internet of Things in the hospital and how the metaverse presents an interesting alternative.  It all starts by creating another version of yourself, to create an avatar for you to enter the space with ML, AI, voice technology, and photogrammetry. Shafi believes this will enable virtual education to be more immersive and global than ever before, especially for healthcare training. He presents Aimedis’s healthcare city in the metaverse as a place where doctors, hospitals, and caregivers can get in touch with patients worldwide and offer them services and support. The plan is for it to be as easy as turning on a smartphone and entering your metaverse property, where you can connect to a healthcare professional in another corner of the world. Shafi discusses how data will be key in defining what that metaverse looks like, as it allows users to share their data better and even monetize it at Aimedis’s Data Exchange Marketplace.  Listen to this episode to learn from professor Shafi Ahmad how the metaverse and the healthcare industry are inevitably meshing together in many different fields for the better!