5G-Health

5G for Health

The healthcare industry is the biggest and fastest growing industry in the world. Despite the potential of digitisation, the anticipated impact in healthcare is yet to be seen, including patient outcomes like improved patient engagement, connected care, unobtrusive monitoring and assisted living for people with chronic conditions, independent and active ageing.

Yet requirements for 5G-enabled health services are similar all around the globe, and therefore standardisable, such as having common standards for recording, sharing, transferring and anonymising health-related data.

5G Health: a groundbreaking opportunity

5G is an engine for innovation across many sectors. Healthcare is no different. The advent of seamless connectivity with guaranteed levels of performance including low latency, high throughput and reliability, smartphones and mobile apps, cloud services and smart connected devices, can enable distributed, patient-centred delivery at multiple points of care, individualised health information and the ability to track patient health metrics powered by big data analytics.
Such scenarios can create new avenues in personalised care, early remote diagnosis, remote surgery, and smart hospitalisation logistics. Increased accessibility to data will enable optimisation in intervention planning (e.g. transplant scenarios), lead to greater transparency, and improve overall patient engagement with healthcare providers.

A decentralised healthcare model

Industry findings point to the following trends1:

  •  Healthcare becomes decentralised.
  •  Point of care shifts increasingly towards homes.
  •  Patient data is centralised with hospitals becoming data centres.

Socio-econonmic impact: healthcare becomes more sustainable in view of demographic trends and the ageing society with increasing costs. Decentralised healthcare is also an opportunity to bring about significant improvements in patient quality of life, such as chronic disease management and assisted living for the ageing population.  

Socio-economic impact: reducing costs and time to access medical specialists, avoiding long waiting lists and complex logistics for rural dwellers. A 5G-enabled decentralised healthcare model will allow remote consultation, diagnosis and health checks, making specialised and high-quality care more affordable for more people

The importance of 5G health use cases

One of the greatest barriers to 5G health development is the lack of communication: relevant players need to fully understand the revolutionary benefits and opportunities of 5G” (Christoph Thuemmler – professor at Napier University, Edinburgh, UK and Global5G.org EAG member, interviewed at IEEE 5G Summit, Helsinki Sept. 2017). It is crucial to bring together mobile and network professionals with healthcare stakeholders so they get a shared understanding of the technology potential and specific use case requirements. 

Use cases will play an important role in laying the foundations for the uptake of 5G Health. This means investigating two categories of requirements: 1) user-driven requirements in terms of Quality of Experience, Quality of Service, user satisfaction and speed of the connection and 2) network-driven requirements in terms of network operation and management.

Consensus on standards

There is consensus that 5G will be an enabler of medical internet of things (MIoT). With the scaling of healthcare devices and sensors, we are at the dawn of the Industrial Internet of Things. Despite the ever increasing number of connected IoT devices gathering and processing huge amounts of health data, healthcare is still an astonishingly fragmented industry and standardisation of data formats and protocols in the health sector is far to be seen. It is now urgent to converge by gaining wide consensus around health related standards with a priority on interoperability-by-design. Interfacing between different industries and health verticals: hospitals, pharmaceutical industry, medical device manufacturers, health authorities.

Stakeholders should also consider the development of a reference architecture in response to specific industry challenges, spanning network slicing, cross-domain orchestration and service aggregation on edge cloud level, governance and privacy). For example, technology advances like SDN-NFV based network slicing are expected to meet high resilience, security, privacy and availability requirements, but consensus is still lacking on even basic definitions of slicing (ETSI 5G Summit 2017).

Supporting IEEE medical technology standardisation efforts with special focus on 5G, e.g. IEEE 802.15.6 –Body Area Networks.

Challenges: regulations, security, privacy

To realise its full potential, the healthcare sector will require a very supportive regulatory framework and common standards. Different policies need to underpin developments in healthcare, ranging from issues like transparency, data ownership, privacy, data exchange, permissions around offering services, and liability issues. Security and privacy are important in this highly regulated industry and will only increase in importance with the General Data Protection Regulation and the Directive on Network and Information Systems.

How Global5G.org for Health can help

Global5G.org for Health is here to help: find out more about 5G Health use cases, navigate relevant standardisation efforts and timelines with our standard tracker, and get the pulse of the new business landscaping with our market watch.   
 

 

Events

06/18/2018 to 06/21/2018

EuCNC2018 Workshop WS1: Vertical Industries & Services for 5G (VIS5G)

Prešernova cesta 10, 1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia
5G-Automotive | 5G-Energy | 5G-Health | 5G-Manufacturing

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02/12/2018 to 02/13/2018

The European 5G Conference 2018

The European 5G Conference will take place on 12th & 13th February 2018 at the Steigenberger Wiltcher’s Hotel, Brussels.

Brussels
5G-Automotive | 5G-Energy | 5G-Health | 5G-Manufacturing

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11/01/2017 to 11/03/2017

BIT’s 5th Annual Global Health Conference-2017(AGHC-2017)

BIT’s 5th Annual Global Health Conference-2017(AGHC-2017 ) will be held in Taiyuan, China on November 1-3, 2017.

Taywan - China
5G-Health

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Last News

GLOBAL5G.org Insights Report: Webinar on "How 5G Can Support Transformation in the Healthcare Industry"

This report summarises the key discussion points of the webinar "How 5G Can Support Transformation in the Healthcare Industry" organized by IDC in collaboration with Trust-IT, as one of the activities included in the European project Global5G.org, a Coordination and Support Action for Phase 2 of the 5G PPP. One of the goals of Global5G.org is highlighting the opportunities and the challenges that 5G will entail for the European Healthcare sector over the next few years.  

06/12/2019 - 17:49

5G-Health

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Highlights from 5G PPP Demo and Exhibition Stands at ICT2018

Eleven 5G PPP phase 2 projects came together to showcase their latest achievements on 5G at ICT2018, 4-6 December in Vienna. Two demo stands, 5G In Action and 5GCity, showcased current achievements on the road to 5G across Europe, while the stand on 5G - Smart Connectivity, was located in the area for public private partnerships, offering a strategic location for new alliances with key stakeholders. 

12/16/2018 - 16:12

5G-Automotive, 5G-Health, 5G-Manufacturing

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International Workshop on Vertical Industries & Services for 5G (VIS5G): In Ljubljana, a Vision for the Future of 5G

As exciting as the technology advances of 5G are, its real future lies in successful and widespread take-up by the vast array of vertical sectors that stand to benefit from its features. But this take-up won’t happen automatically – a rich and constant dialogue both at the technical and application levels must arise between the technology providers and the vertical industry stakeholders. That was the vision of the VIS5G Workshop: to nurture this dialogue into self-sustaining momentum.

06/30/2018 - 10:06

5G-Automotive, Trials-and-testbeds, 5G-Energy, 5G-Health, 5G-Manufacturing

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EC launches 5G PPP Phase 3 with three new projects

Three new 5G PPP projects were introduced in an EuCNC Special Session chaired by David Kennedy, the To-Euro-5G project coordinator, in Ljubljana, Slovenia. The projects starting on 1 July 2018 – 5G EVE5G-VINNI and 5GENESIS – will address the challenge of H2020 EC 5G PPP ICT-17-2018: 5G End to End Facility. These three projects were selected on merit from 16 proposals received and will run for 3 years.

06/25/2018 - 14:42

5G-Automotive, Policy-and-regulations, Small cell, Standards, Trials-and-testbeds, 5G-Energy, 5G-Health, 5G-Manufacturing

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Interview with Ian Hay: the role of standardisation for 5G Health and Care

We interviewed Ian Hay, Chair of the Global Technical Committee for PCH Alliance, to share his insights and answer a few of the most pressing questions regarding the 5G Health sector.

02/05/2018 - 17:26

5G-Health

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Interview with Christoph Thuemmler: 5G for Health and Care

At the Helsinki5GWeek we interviewed Christoph Thuemmler (Global5G.org EAG member) to discuss about the role of 5G for Health & Care

10/20/2017 - 21:10

5G-Health

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Christoph Thuemmler: 5G on the road to Health 4.0

We are at the dawn of major transformations in healthcare as we move towards Health 4.0. How can 5G and IoT enable these transformations and what barriers need addressing to fully realise the benefits?

10/19/2017 - 09:41

5G-Health

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5G Health Session - The Road to 5G and Standardisation for Health & Care Services | IEEE 5G Summit, 18 September 2017, Helsinki

Global5G.org is organising its first 5G Health Session during the IEEE 5G Summit on 18 September 2017, as part of the Helsinki5GWeek. An exceptional line-up of experts from the health Industry, Telecom and Standardisation areas will shed light on the challenging theme “The Road to 5G and Standardisation for new Health and Care Services”.

08/23/2017 - 15:39

5G-Health

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