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Governing immersive biomedical tech, health and human rights in the Metaverse

The current landscape of academic legal scholarship relating to immersive biomedical technologies and health in the Metaverse is very limited. Bearing in mind that technologies, such as the Metaverse, evoke ideas of disruption, this project is crucial to fill the regulatory gaps about the governance of a health Metaverse. As it currently stands, whilst there is a great deal of excitement about the future of healthcare applications in the Metaverse, a whole host of questions presently compel us, as legal scholars, to evaluate the possible standing of laws within the Metaverse.

There is presently no international law or even regional or supranational laws that govern the Metaverse. At present, the Metaverse is operated on terms and conditions put forward by individual technological platforms that provide virtual spaces independent of the physical elements of the real-world, with these digital virtual spaces boasting its own digital economy, virtual assets and virtual currency. For example, who or what governs the Metaverse? Are ‘transactions’ (in the case, provision of healthcare services, selling of medicinal products) in the Metaverse subject to laws in the way of the natural world? Does an avatar (an avatar patient, an avatar doctor) challenge the concept of legal personhood? By this, do we also own any kind of personal health data that can be generated in the Metaverse? How will this health data be protected, and how will the right to privacy generally operate? Does the right to healthcare have the same scope and content in the Metaverse as in the physical world? 

The project, titled 'The Legal Governance of a Health Metaverse: Health, Immersive Biomedical Technologies, and Human Rights' (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.

The novelty and innovative nature of Lex-HMT lies in its critical and deep exploration of a still-developing technological wonder. Bringing critical legal dimensions into the realm of health, biomedicine, bioethics and immersive technologies is exciting, and pushes the boundaries of application of legal knowledge to new and emerging technologies. Legal research is often extremely traditional, black letter and doctrinal in nature. Lex-HMT is innovative because it also looks to the future, capitalizing early on in a global conversation that is just beginning about the Metaverse. Other than the potentialities of EU-level regulations, there is little scholarship of how governance and rights can be interpreted in the Metaverse in the future. Lex-HMT will use the law to enquire, as one example, how the VR/AR/XR experiential learning in medical surgeries, may adequately be translated into real-life permutations and protect patients from harm. It will enquire whether the bioethical principles of informed consent, should be extended and become more dynamic in the Metaverse, and might this also mean that avatars should be granted legal personhood? Hence, the research has highly significant potential to open up new lines of enquiry. Lex-HMT will contribute to knowledge and scholarship in exploring creative ways of governing new and emerging technologies and provides the pre-cursor to novel approaches and new research within the field of virtual worlds for health, medicine, values, behaviours and legal implications. It will be of interest to industry health tech developers and will inform the development of software/hardware to improve health and biomedicine and promote their engagement with Metaverse content. It will also provide important insights for policy-makers, including the DRCF (in which the Principal Investigator was an expert panellist) and the AI APPG.  

Partners

  • Interest Group on Supranational Bio-Law
  • European Association of Health Law
  • Responsible Metaverse Alliance
  • Digital Regulation Cooperation Forum (DRCF)

Meet the Principal Investigator(s) for the project

Pin Lean Lau
Pin Lean Lau - Pin Lean is a Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Bio-Law at Brunel Law School, joining Brunel University London in January 2021. A former practising barrister and solicitor, she was a corporate-commercial attorney working primarily in corporate finance, mergers and acquisitions, technology law, and general corporate advisory matters. Prior to joining Brunel University, she was an attorney on secondment with the Legal Services Team (based in Belgrave, London) in the General Counsel's Organization of American Express International, where she was a key senior legal counsel for the Asia-Pacific region. She obtained her SJD in Comparative Constitutional Law from Central European University, Budapest, Hungary, in 2019 (nostrified in the UK in 2020), earning highest honours, Summa cum Laude, for her thesis titled 'Comparative Legal Frameworks for Pre-Implantation Genetic Interventions' (which has been written into a monograph published by Springer Switzerland).  Pin Lean is the General Manager of the Centre for Artificial Intelligence: Social & Digital Innovations. She is an active member of the Brunel International Law Research Group, Living Avatars Research Group, the Human Rights, Society and the Arts Research Group, and Reproduction Research Group. Externally, she is part of the ELSI2.0 Workspace, an international collaboratory on genomics and society research; a member of the European Association of Health Law (EAHL), and a General Manager of the Interest Group on Supranational Bio-Law of the EAHL; and a member of the Daughters of Themis: International Network of Women Business Scholars. She has held visiting fellowships with the Centre for Health, Law and Emerging Technologies (HeLEX), NDPH (Medical Sciences Division), University of Oxford; the Centre for Ethics and Law in the Life Sciences (CELLs) at the University of Hannover, Germany; and participated in the Centre for Ethics and Law in Biomedicine (CELAB) in Central European University, Hungary. Pin Lean also leads the UK & European chapter of the global Responsible Metaverse Alliance as Director of Research; and is an invited member of the United Nations (UN) International Telecommunications Union (ITU) Working Group on the Metaverse, focusing on competition, economics, standards and regulatory aspects of the Metaverse.  Her research encompasses European, international, and comparative law for genome editing (with a focus on pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, reproductive technologies and women's bodies; and the proliferation of virulent gene-edited pathogens and global bio-security); propertization and commodification studies of genetic materials and biomedical technologies; the ethico-legal governance for artificial intelligence (AI) systems (with a focus on protection of fundamental rights, spatial 'body citizenship' and bio-constitutional implications of the AI-augmented biological human body, and AI in women's health); and technologies horizon scanning and legal future foresighting for new and emerging technologies and environments, such as the Metaverse. She has written widely on topics straddling the fringes of laws, technologies and society, and has been invited as a speaker by many national and international organisations, including on podcasts relating to technologies, and media interviews with news organisations in the UK, US, France, Germany, Brazil, Hungary, Malaysia, Japan, and India. Recently, she was invited as an expert panelist by the UK regulatory alliance, the Digital Cooperation Regulation Forum (DRCF) in its first Metaverse Symposium. She has also consulted as an expert with the UK Law Society on technologies and horizon scanning in its Future Worlds 2050 Project.  Pin Lean previously consulted on a multi-trust funded project for the World Health Organization (WHO), Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the OiE (World Organization for Animal Health), on developing and piloting of a Tripartite One Health Assessment Tool for Antimicrobial Resistance Relevant Legislation. She also completed a project with researchers from the EAHL to produce a Joint Statement for the European Commission's 2021 Thematic Networks, with a proposal for Health as a Fundamental Value, as part of the EU Pharmaceutical Strategy. She led a project on AI-driven technologies in women's healthcare, funded by the Institute for Communities & Society. Besides this, she is also working on several book projects, including health and IP rights in EU health law, and EU health databases; on the EU Draft Law for Artificial Intelligence and data protection; on AI gender data gap and data feminism; and on FemTech and effective AI stewardship for women's healthcare. She is also a contributor in the EuroGCT Project (European Gene & Cell Therapy Project) funded by the European Commission's Horizon 2020 Work Programme, contributing in the area of data misuse and mission creep in EU health laws relating to patient involvement and patient data. She was the keynote speaker, with the presentation titled 'Hidden Figures: Algorithmic Biases in Health and Medical AI - European Law Perspectives' at the XVI Inter-Autonomous Conference on the Legal Protection of Patients: Science and Data as Ingredients for the Transformation of Healthcare Organisations.  She led a European Commission Health Policy Platform project, together with civil society organisation, Health Action International, to produce a Joint Statement and policy recommendations for the European Commission 2022 Thematic Networks, on the impact of artificial intelligence on health outcomes (reducing health inequalities) of marginalised groups in the EU - presenting this report to the European Commission in Luxembourg in April 2023. She currently leads the Stakeholder Network for this project on the EU Health Policy Platform. From August 2023, Pin Lean leads a project (Lex-HMT) focusing on legal and regulatory aspects of immersive biomedical technologies in virtual worlds, and is expected to provide oral evidence to the AI All-Parliamentary Group (AI APPG) in the UK House of Lords in November 2023. She has also recently been successful as Co-Investigator in a UKRI-funded regulatory science & innovation network funding application with The Global Counsel and Digital Catapult, on spatial computing, web3.0 and the Metaverse. 

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Project last modified 21/03/2024