Doctors to use the Metaverse to travel inside your body

FILE - The metaverse may soon allow doctors to travel into the bodies of their patients and an area known as telepresence is often overlooked but will become an important part of the virtual world.

FILE - The metaverse may soon allow doctors to travel into the bodies of their patients and an area known as telepresence is often overlooked but will become an important part of the virtual world.

Published Aug 7, 2022

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With the 'metaverse' becoming a more frequent buzzword, applications of its virtual world are making inroads into the medical field and may soon allow doctors to travel into the bodies of their patients.

Computer scientist, entrepreneur, and inventor Louis Rosenberg said in a recent blog post for VentureBeat that an area within the Metaverse known as telepresence is often overlooked but will become an important part of the virtual world.

"While virtual reality brings users into simulated worlds, telepresence uses remote robots to bring users to distant places, giving them the ability to look around and perform complex tasks.

"If we combine that concept with another classic sci-fi tale, Fantastic Voyage (1966), we can imagine tiny robotic vessels that go inside the body and swim around under the control of doctors who diagnose patients from the inside and even perform surgical tasks," Rosenberg said.

How the technology works

Technology supporting this kind of innovation within the health field is already underway. Founded in 2019, Endiatx focuses on micro-robotics inside the human body and has created a minute robotic drone, known as the PillBot, that can be swallowed through a pill by patients.

Meanwhile, the drone is piloted remotely inside the stomach and other parts of a patient's digestive tract, making it a minuscule remote-controlled submarine the size of a pill which is able to transfer real-time data to a doctor's smartphone, tablet or PC.

Further implementation and development of such technology could also well be supported by others, such as assisted/augmented (AR) and virtual reality (VR) technologies.

Recently, IOL reported that despite their slow adoption, AR and VR technologies could come back in the manufacturing and medical fields, with Ronald Ravel, South Africa B2B director at laptop manufacturer Dynabook, saying that the technology could see adoption across industries within the next five years.

"With assisted/augmented (AR) and virtual reality (VR) technologies making inroads into the market, manufacturers are finding ways of incorporating it into their everyday practices," Ravel said.

Augmented and Virtual Reality technologies have been widely implemented across various industries. They could well support innovations like the PillBot by allowing doctors to see data through a VR headset in lieu of a smartphone or tablet screen.

South Africa itself isn't far behind metaversal trends, with almost half the country's population active on social networks, already venturing into a digital world.

A recent study into the country's current social networking trends, the SA Social Media Landscape Report 2022 by Ornico Group and World Wide Worx, reported that in 2021, 48.8% of adult South Africans accessed a social network.

IOL Tech

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