Emerging network technologies, including the next generation mobile technology (5G), will form the backbone of future healthcare. 5G is a key enabling technology for the Internet of Things, Smart Pharmaceuticals, and Individualized Medicine. The features of 5G, such as low latency, reliability, performance, and flexibility, enable novel features to and better quality of eHealth services. The aim of our project is to identify novel use cases of eHealth that take advantage of 5G capabilities, study and develop 5G enablers for the use cases, develop and validate actual eHealth solutions in real environments and real 5G test networks, and disseminate and exploit the results. The project will study selected high-impact and industry-driven use cases for future eHealth enabled by 5G. So far, we have identified three potential eHealth scenarios: healthcare@home, hospital environment of the future, and emergency situations; all including technology-focused sub-use cases benefitting from 5G. The aim is to refine the scenarios and use cases during the project together with partners in order to increase the societal, business, and scientific impacts of the project.
The main focus of the project is to study and develop novel eHealth services that will be enabled by the upcoming 5th generation mobile technology (5G). The project will a) refine novel use cases related to eHealth that take advantage of and have need for the 5G capabilities, b) study and develop selected 5G network and service enablers as well as prototype eHealth applications for the use cases, c) pilot and validate the solutions in real environments and with end-users, including 5G test networks and hospitals, for example, d) and disseminate and exploit the results for the benefit of the society, science, and business. The work will be based on carefully selected, high-impact and industry-driven use cases for future eHealth, including hospital environment of the future, health@home, and emergency situations. The use cases will be detailed further, analysed, and experimented during the project’s lifetime.
We define the project’s vision as follows: “We envision a health monitoring system enabled by 5G-based heterogeneous networks by having various integrated wireless radio and cloud technologies, protocol designs, standards, and semantics. Such a system will satisfy application requirements in terms of connectivity, reliability, timeliness and throughput as well as bring benefits to individuals and the society.”
In order to support the overall goal and vision, the more specific project objectives and workflow are detailed in the following list and illustrated in the simple figure below:
- The project aims to identify and refine novel, industry-driven use cases of eHealth that take advantage of 5G capabilities.
- The project aims to define the technology and business requirements and KPIs as well as the overall system architecture for the 5G-enabled eHealth services based on the use cases.
- The project aims to study and develop the 5G network and service enablers, required for meeting the connectivity and processing requirements of the target eHealth applications.
- The project aims to develop prototypes of selected eHealth applications and solutions based on the use cases.
- The project aims to integrate the networking solutions and applications as well as tackle any interoperability issues in terms of hardware and software to enable healthcare within 5G.
- The project will validate and pilot the solutions in real 5G test networks and end-user environments (e.g. hospitals), using eHealth IoT devices equipped with various radios and standard protocols.
- Finally, the project’s results will be disseminated to public and scientific forums, contributed to standardization, as well as exploited for the benefits of the participating organizations and society.