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

TLDR

The Metaverse, emerging as the next‑generation internet infrastructure, has attracted attention for its potential to transform medical and health informatics. This study conducts a bibliometric analysis of over 34,000 Metaverse‑related publications spanning 22 years to introduce the concept of Health Metaverse. Using Zipf’s, Bradford’s, and Lotka’s laws, the authors map the research framework, identify challenges, and explore applications of Health Metaverse. The analysis identifies four key perspectives—knowledge, socialization, digitalization, and intelligence—highlighting a framework centered on multimodal medical standards, data fusion, telemedicine, AI, and innovations in education and surgery, while noting challenges in technology upgrades, gamification, privacy, and reality escape.

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.