UK’s DeHealth to Create a 3D Healthcare Metaverse

British nonprofit DeHealth is looking into making a “decentralized metaverse” to allow doctors and patients to interact in another “new world,” a Wednesday (Dec. 22) press release says.

The release says doctors and patients will be able to work and earn virtual assets by selling anonymized medical data.

The DeHealth world will incorporate a HLT, or health token, which the release says “will become the main mean of settlement within the ecosystem that will power it from the inside.”

DeHealth also plans to incorporate virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR) and mixed reality technology into its metaverse, allowing numerous participants to communicate in a virtual space. Per the release, users should be able to transfer their digital identity, or avatar, to other digital platforms without losing their medical data.

A beta version of the DeHealth metaverse is slated to come out in late 2022, when it will become available to Hospital OS users.

The pandemic has spurred a number of new technologies related to the need to keep people physically apart, and the metaverse has seen a number of new developments since 2020.

PYMNTS writes that companies involved in physical labor, including inspecting oil rigs or training people to repair a vehicle, have been making use of assisted reality wearables to help from remote places.

Related: Pandemic Drives New Use Cases for Assisted Reality Wearables

Several of the devices come from the company RealWear. The devices in question will happen through a head-mounted camera and display, letting the expert to see what someone else is seeing on-site while still working from a remote location.

In addition, the expert will have the ability to give instructions, verbally or visually, through the display. The device is able to be used hands-free by the person on-site.

RealWear chief product officer Rama Oruganity said this could be the “new normal” where not everyone needed to travel all the time.

RealWear’s newest product came out on Dec. 8, including a new wearable that doesn’t immerse the user in the digital world. Instead, the product allows them see the digital world right below their field of view, like they’re in a car looking at a dashboard.

This could help out with tense environments like industrial cases which could be hazardous, where the user’s field of vision can’t be interrupted.