How COVID-19 impacts telehealth: an empirical study of telehealth services, users and the use of metaverse

Abstract

Since the outbreak of the coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, telehealth services are regarded as a good approach to keep health workers and patients safe while simultaneously managing available resources. In this paper, we discuss the impact that COVID-19 has on telehealth services and on telehealth users' opinion of the service. We collected 245 Android telehealth apps, 144 iOS telehealth apps and 86 telehealth websites, and performed a systematic analysis on this dataset. In this analysis, we conducted a comparison analysis and relevant content analysis of the telehealth apps as well as their security risks. Apart from the mobile platforms, we also inspected the telehealth websites' features, particularly those related to the use of metaverse to improve current telehealth solutions. To further understand people's attitude towards telehealth services, we invited users to participate in a user study aimed at revealing what impact COVID-19 has on users' willingness to adopt telehealth services and revealing the gap between the telehealth service and its users. Our result shows that 27.1% new iOS apps and 27.4% new Android apps were released after the COVID-19 announcement, and a surge of updates were noted within 4 weeks after the COVID-19 announcement. We further found that COVID-19 is frequently mentioned in telehealth app reviews in the second and third quarter of 2020, and the most mentioned aspects related to COVID-19 include family, test result and vaccine. According to our user study, COVID-19 has a significant impact on the selection of telehealth services, especially for female participants, people aged 46–55, and students. The investigation also finds out that the use of metaverse will significantly improves the effectiveness of traditional telehealth solutions.