The Evolving Role of Extended Reality in Healthcare: The Metaverse and Digital Health 4.0

Trends, Challenges, and Transformation in the Healthcare Extended Reality Industry

Extended reality (XR) is an umbrella term that encompasses a broad spectrum of immersive technologies, including mixed reality (MR), augmented reality (AR), and virtual reality (VR) technologies. Regarding healthcare IT, the early-medium stage healthcare XR market is still finding use cases through which it can expand geographically and to other applications, making this a promising market.

Healthcare XR can be segmented by application - treatment and care, surgery and imaging, and education and training. Some of these can overlap, making solutions more complex and increasing their usability. In life sciences, XR applications are still nascent, and they focus on pharmaceutical and biotechnology applications.

This analysis explores the trends, challenges, drivers, restraints, performance, and challenges of XR technology adoption in healthcare IT, focusing on the current state of the market and its potential development. Providers and patients are getting to know the devices and software - knowledge and adoption rates are still low. Deployment will be a long path due to regulatory compliance issues, technology development, licensing, and medical trials. Some challenges for implementing XR technologies in healthcare include budgetary constraints, resistance to change, scalable solutions, interoperability, and smooth connection with other technologies in the field, such as generative AI, large language models (LLM), Internet of Medical Things (IoMT), and Cloud.