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Health 5G
Twenty-six partners across seven countries joined forces to study and develop novel eHealth services enabled by 5G.
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Several ongoing projects focus on 5G in healthcare in the Nordic and Baltic countries. This map shows the initiatives in the region. Tap on the dots to learn more about each project.
In this storymap we will introduce one of these projects: The example of the project Health5G.
Health 5G
In an excellent example of international collaboration, up to 26 partners across seven countries around the world came together to work on the project Health 5G. German, Spanish, Irish, South Korean, Swedish, and Turkish organisations joined forces to study and develop novel eHealth services enabled by 5G.
European partners
Eight Swedish organisations, combining companies and universities, participated in the pilot case study carried out in the country—the country pilot aimed at providing an end-to-end demonstration of the combined capabilities of the Swedish-Turkish consortium.
Health5G: Patient Home Care: Integrated Swedish Demonstration
Among the many opportunities that 5G offers in healthcare, the 5G Health project stands out by its novel approach to delivering health solutions for healthcare professionals and patients. The project aimed to identify and develop 5G solutions that could be applied in healthcare.
One of those solutions focuses on bringing healthcare solutions to patients' homes by connecting patients with healthcare professionals or through real-time monitoring of patients.
The Swedish partners mainly carried out this scenario, and the idea was to develop the whole value chain from the necessary technological equipment to providing healthcare at home.
The equipment includes a home rehabilitation system allowing patients to be remotely monitored by medical professionals; a dosage manager which is an intelligent drug dosing device with digital capability to enable remote adherence monitoring; and a telepresence device enabling video meetings over 5G.
Alkit eSense Home Rehabilitation System
Enablers
One primary driver of this development is the standardization of network slicing. That would enable interoperability between core 5G networks.
Another enabler is the O-RAN Alliance, a community of mobile operators, vendors, research, and academic institutions that aim to reshape radio access networks to become more intelligent, open, centralized, and fully interoperable. Cristina Seceleanu, Project Manager at Mälardalen University and coordinator of the Swedish pilot, states that:
Their work is very important because 5G test networks could implement the architecture of the O-RAN alliance.
Challenges
However, this approach presents some challenges for future technological development in the healthcare field. One of these challenges is that end users, both healthcare professionals and patients, might not have had precise demands on how the technology could cater to their needs.
It was because the project mainly aimed at investigating which applications require 5G and less at getting a patient-centered product on the market. In this context, the project lacked stakeholder involvement in the design and implementation stages of the pilot, which is a crucial aspect when developing technological healthcare solutions. As Cristina Seceleanu says:
Acceptance by end users comes after extensive evaluation that includes representatives and patients.
The involvement of relevant stakeholders also needs to include aspects of transparency and explainability to foster users’ acceptance and trust in the new technology. It should be ensured that decision processes are comprehensible and open to scrutiny. Particularly in the healthcare field, where sensible patient data is processed, technology should adhere to the highest standards regarding generating reliable results free from bias and discrimination. Targeted communication around these efforts can advance user acceptance and trust.
Other challenges refer to technical, legal and security-related aspects of adopting 5G. On the technical level, a challenge faced by the project was the lack of standardisation of network slicing. Network slicing targets different services with different speed, latency, and reliability requirements. It is a vital requirement for healthcare applications as interferences in the network can be avoided through network slicing. The problem of standardisation resides in the licensing of frequency spectrum, which, at the moment, is carried out through auctions in the national market.
Additional challenges relate to the potential misuse of the technologies. High data protection standards and security measures are required to protect the patients’ data and privacy more generally from third-party misuse.