Virtual World Technology for Healthcare: A survey

Information Technology (IT) has seen dramatic improvements in the recent past, and laid foundations in the area of Virtual Reality (VR) technology. VR applications have branched out into numerous domains from education and entertainment to critical applications like Healthcare enabling virtual surgery, telemedicine and further medical applications. One of the key technologies in VR in recent times is Virtual World (VW) using Second Life as a part of Web 2.0 and Social Computing. The objective of the paper is to survey the various Virtual Reality and Virtual World applications in Healthcare and present the status of such applications, the expertise available and the challenges ahead in using it for Healthcare. As a part of the objective , the applications were studied from the perspective of usefulness , feasibility and cost of implementation of applications Based on this, the paper highlights that the Second Life has advantages of better feasibility of implementation and proposes a phased approach to implement VW in hospitals from initial low-critical to high-critical applications. Second Life approach also enables customized applications for healthcare based on the specific needs and medical challenges of the hospitals and the local people.