Exploring Research Trends of Emerging Technologies in Health Metaverse: A Bibliometric Analysis

Abstract

With the development of the digital economy, Metaverse has gained wide attention being the infrastructure of the next-generation internet. Medical and health informatics holds a promising future in the Metaverse. This study leverages a bibliometric analysis of over 34 thousand Metaverse-related publications in 22 years to propose a novel concept called Health Metaverse. We applied the methods of Zipf’s Law, Bradford’s Law, and Lotka’s Law respectively to explore the research framework, challenges and application of Health Metaverse. Four perspectives, namely knowledge, socialization, digitalization, and intelligence, are summarized from our analysis results. The Health Metaverse framework mainly focuses on multimodal medical information standards, medical and social data fusion, telemedicine and online health management, and medical artificial intelligence. It also provides invaluable innovative drive in medical education, surgical procedures, and connection between service providers and patients. However, there are challenges in technology upgrades, gamification of medical service, protection of patient privacy, and prevention of people from escaping from reality.

Keywords: Health Metaverse; Telemedicine; Virtual Reality; Medical Informatics; Bibliometric Analysis