5G & AI Powered Smart Hospitals

5G Telehealth has been one of the main driving use cases for upgrading the infrastructure. While some use cases definitely make sense, some others like remote surgery will most likely never happen, at least the way it's depicted today.

At the GSMA Mobile 360 APAC - 5G Industry Community Summit, Michael Fung, Chief Information Officer from CHUK Medical Centre presented a nice talk detailing how they see 5G & AI powered hospitals of the future. The video of his talk is embedded at the bottom of this post.

There have also been some other discussions on 5G & healthcare recently. Here are the links if you want to explore this topic further:

• Video: UK5G Presents Health & Social Care Panel Session
• Video: Telecoms Europe 5G 2021 - What can 5G do for healthcare?
• Video: Ericsson - 5G Connected Ambulance
• Video: 5G Healthcare Application for Smart Hospital - Tseung Kwan O Hospital
• Article: Vodafone Germany launches real-time network in the first 5G hospital 

Service Level Agreements for 5G and Beyond: Overview, Challenges and Enablers of 5G-Healthcare Systems - https://t.co/axJ05r2VqX via U.S. FDA (@US_FDA)#Free5Gtraining #5G #5GTechnology #5GUseCases #5GHealthcare #Healthcare #SLA #Cybersecurity #5Gsecurity pic.twitter.com/O9c0GEemt4

— Free 5G Training (@5Gtraining) December 6, 2021

The US FDA recently published a one pager looking at how Service level agreements (SLAs) can enable 5G-enabled medical device use cases by documenting how a medical device communication requirement is met by the unique characteristics of 5G networks and the roles and responsibilities of the stakeholders involved in offering safe and effective 5G-enabled healthcare to patients.

IEEE Access has a detailed paper on this topic by the same authors. Quoting from the abstract:

Service level agreements (SLAs) can enable 5G-enabled medical device use cases by documenting how a medical device communication requirements are met by the unique characteristics of 5G networks and the roles and responsibilities of the stakeholders involved in offering safe and effective 5G-enabled healthcare to patients. However, there are gaps in this space that should be addressed to facilitate the efficient implementation of 5G technology in healthcare. Current literature is scarce regarding SLAs for 5G and is absent regarding SLAs for 5G-enabled medical devices. This paper aims to bridge these gaps by identifying key challenges, providing insight, and describing open research questions related to SLAs in 5G and specifically 5G-healthcare systems. This is helpful to network service providers, users, and regulatory authorities in developing, managing, monitoring, and evaluating SLAs in 5G-enabled medical systems.

Here is the video from GSMA 5G Industry Community Summit Part 2:

Related Posts:

• The 3G4G Blog: 5G Remote Surgery and Telehealth Solutions
• The 3G4G Blog: Banana and Egg gets 5G Telesurgery
• Operator Watch Blog: Vodafone Deutschland (Germany) Continues 5G Use Cases Innovation
• Operator Watch Blog - China Mobile on The Next Phase of 5G: Progress, Challenges, and Opportunities 

Two VoLTE Deployment Case Studies

Back in 2011, I was right in predicting that we will not see VoLTE as early as everyone had predicted. Looking through my twitter archive, I would say I was about right.

As I said earlier, CSFB for now and VoLTE around 2014 - RT @mitchellkp: LTE won't find voice anytime soon http://t.co/mn0EwAw

— Zahid Ghadialy (@zahidtg) September 7, 2011

Soon = before 2015. Ideally, if its working then never, until forced - RT @Gabeuk: I suspect VoLTE adoption will pick-up briskly in 2013.

— Zahid Ghadialy (@zahidtg) July 13, 2011

The big issue with VoLTE has always been the complexity. In a post last year I provided a quote from China Mobile group vice-president Mr.Liu Aili, "VoLTE network deployment is the one of the most difficult project ever, the implementation complexity and workload is unparalleled in history".

From a recent information published by IHS, there will only be 310 million subscribers by end of 2016 and 2020 is when 1 billion subscribers can make use of VoLTE. I think the number will probably be much higher as we will have VoLTE by stealth.

Below are couple of case studies, one from SK Telecom, presented by Chloe(Go-Eun) Lee and other from Henry Wong, CTO Mobile Engineering, Hong Kong Telecom (HKT). Hope you find them informative and useful.