Читать книгу Shaping Future 6G Networks - Группа авторов - Страница 38

The global increase in the cost of providing healthcare services to a continuously ageing and growing population is rapidly becoming unsustainable. In this context, 6G is positioned to foster the healthcare revolution by eliminating time and space barriers through telemedicine, achieving healthcare workflow optimizations, and guaranteeing patient access to increasingly more efficient and affordable health assistance.

On one side, 6G connectivity solutions should enable the transition from a traditional provider–patient relationship toward a “care outside hospital” paradigm, where primary care services will be delivered by health professionals directly to the patients at home. Moving care outside clinics and health facilities will not only promote more individualized and personalized assistance but also empower preventive care while avoiding that fragile patients with limited mobility capabilities need to travel. From a business‐oriented perspective, home care guarantees the most efficient use of healthcare resources (e.g. preventive care can drastically reduce the need for expensive treatments for patients with chronic conditions) and a significant reduction of management and administration costs for institutional care centers [7].

Cost savings in the healthcare industry will also increase the reach and accessibility to healthcare assistance to the most unprivileged and least developed countries in the world, thus making it possible for an estimated billion extra patients globally to receive quality treatment [8]. The goal is to achieve healthier life years and more efficient health and social care for a larger population [8, pp. 5–6].

Moreover, the development of 6G technologies, together with the digitalization of healthcare services, will allow more granular and higher quality data to be collected on patients, thereby improving clinical analyses and reducing health costs associated with treatments of diseases.

Furthermore, 6G innovations should drive the design and adoption of new use cases in the healthcare sector. VR‐ and AR‐based technologies will facilitate remote patient monitoring, while artificial intelligence and tactile sensing will enable even more invasive healthcare assistance through robotic telesurgery, i.e. remote surgery where surgeon and patient are geographically separated. Robotics and automation advancements will empower connected ambulances, while holographic solutions combined with the transmission of important health indicators (collected through wireless body sensors) will make it possible to improve healthcare assistance via virtual patient consultation and monitoring.

Due to technology limitations in today’s wireless networks, future healthcare applications are calling for the design of new wireless communication systems that support continuous interaction with mobile end users. Besides the high cost and the lack of medical professionals and infrastructures in today’s healthcare industry, the current major limitation is the lack of real‐time tactile feedback. Moreover, the explosion of advanced eHealth and mobile Health (mHealth) services challenges the ability to meet their stringent QoS requirements. For reliable remote surgery, for example, the latency demands will be in the order of sub‐milliseconds, which are not yet achievable with upcoming 5G innovations. Even for less latency‐critical use cases, e.g., digital healthcare assistance enabled through VR/AR technologies, combined with holographic communication, will pose very strict requirements in terms of end‐to‐end throughput will need to be satisfied (for 3D MediVision products, a resolution of 1920 × 1080 pixel and a frame rate of 120 fps for 3D displays will require multi‐Gbps data rates to be supported [9]). Extremely high reliability (>99.99999%) will also be needed due to the potentially catastrophic consequences of a communication failure. It is estimated that the increased spectrum availability, combined with the refined intelligence of 6G networks, will guarantee these KPIs, together with 5–10× gains in spectral efficiency [1].

In this context, integrating networks and applications emerges as a viable approach to support resource‐demanding services by exchanging information in such a way that specific requirements are satisfied. For example, different network configurations and related system parameters (including – but not limited to – the choice about the optimal deployment, power allocation, interface selection) should be adopted based on network’s available resources and supported capabilities and dynamically (and iteratively) updated until network requirements are satisfied.