5G for Healthcare

source: Ericsson

Few doubt that 5G will affect healthcare. Increasing dependence on wearables and remote treatments makes 5G essential to provide reliable and secure services, many will argue.

The issue is which devices will be required to support various health and status monitoring operations. Although consumer-grade wearables are being widely used for preventative measures, 55 percent of healthcare decision makers from regulatory bodies say these devices are not sufficiently accurate or reliable for diagnosis.

To reliably measure biomedical signals,  such as ECG, EEG, blood pressure, blood sugar, body temperature and stress, medical-grade wearables will be required.

In addition, for liability reasons it will be very difficult to rely on patients' smartphones for connectivity.

source: Ericsson

Such devices could also automatically dispense medicine and offer convenience to those recovering from surgery. Last year, the US Federal Drug Administration (FDA) approved the first automated medical device that monitors the blood sugar levels for type 1 diabetes and automatically injects a dose of insulin, Ericsson argues.

Expectations are that 5G will be profoundly more useful as a communications platform than 4G, providing both low latency, higher bandwidth and better battery life, for example.

Some 35 percent of industry decision makers expect 5G to provide reliable and sub-1ms latency connections, which enable haptic feedback to underpin surgeons' capabilities to carry out remote robotic surgery.

Although fiber can deliver low latency connectivity, experts say 5G would be preferable for availability reasons. While optical fiber is used for backhaul network, 5G is most likely to provide the last mile connectivity which is also mobile.