The aim of our study titled “Promoting Health in Virtual Worlds: Lessons from Second Life” was to find out whether Second Life is a working and functional platform supporting the empowerment of people in health-related issues.

We conducted a review of the current health-related activity in Second Life, coupled with an extensive series of observations and interactions with the respective resources inside Second Life.

We identified a total of 24 active health resources were found in Second Life, indicating that health-related activity is rather limited in Second Life, though at first glance it appears to contain very rich health-related content. The other main shortcomings of Second Life relate to a lack of activity, a low number of users, problems with Second Life’s search features, and the difficulty of finding trustworthy information.

The paper can be found from here

Bibliographic information
Suomi, Reima, Mäntymäki, Matti & Söderlund, Sari (2014). Promoting Health in Virtual Worlds: Lessons from Second Life. Journal of Medical Internet Research, Vol. 16, no. 10.