The key aims of this project are: 1) to examine how immersive biomedical technologies, health and human rights can, and should be governed in the Metaverse; 2) to investigate the key regulatory challenges for health Metaverse in light of existing state of the art immersive biomedical technologies (such as VR, AR and XR); 3) to extrapolate the application of existing, analogous real-world legislation or other regulations by the United Kingdom (UK) and European Union (EU), to immersive biomedical technologies in the health Metaverse; and 4) to critically highlight the key regulatory gaps for health (and especially, immersive biomedical technologies) in the Metaverse.

Lex-HMT wishes to push the boundaries of health law scholarship in the Metaverse, by investigating the proliferation of immersive technologies that will likely have the most impact on health and medicine in the future, and how the law can (and should) respond to this huge paradigm shift. Whilst there is a significant body of scholarship that highlight transformative changes the Metaverse will bring, and a growing field of scholarly literature on data protection (broadly) and the application of Regulation (EU) 2016/679 (General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR) or even the UK Data Protection Act 2018 to the Metaverse – there is almost nothing about the application of analogous laws to health Metaverse – such as informed consent by avatars, or a revision of medical or clinical liability in negligence. A limited scholarship is fielded around the topic of sensitive health data, and how the European Health Data Space (EHDS), for example, might have applicability in the Metaverse – but very little has been done to examine the specific aspects of health and immersive technologies in specific areas of biomedicine in the Metaverse – which Lex-HMT will undertake. 

With these considerations in mind, and to achieve the stipulated aims, Lex-HMT asks the following questions: -

1.     To what extent do (and can) existing analogous real-world health, technology, and biomedical laws apply to the Metaverse?

2.     How can international and supranational laws and human rights treaties, particularly those relevant to health, adequately protect the fundamental human rights of users or consumers in a health Metaverse?