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ICT for Health: Networks, standards and innovation

However, story will be different when talking about precision in surgical procedures. Thanks to 5G, we
URLLC. In prior wireless evolution, most of our can reconstruct the three-dimensional view and transmit
attention has been on the transmission speed and these high-definition streaming media [13]. Remote
network capacity enhancement, less attention has been body vital sign monitoring sensors can be used for the
paid to the latency and reliability (successive packet in-home health monitoring, diagnosis and treatment and
rate delivery (SPRD) [10]). This is because that the 10 rescue ambulance. It can save rescue time, travel costs,
ms magnitude latency and 1 − 10 −2 reliability are not and reduce the number of outpatients.
challenging technical issues (e.g., the channel coding and However, ICT-assisted health systems propose some
re-transmission can achieve 1 − 10 −2 SPRD). However, new challenging issues to the legal and ethical fields. In
when it comes to less than 1 ms latency and 1 − literature, the relationship between robots and humans
[10 −9 , 10 −5 ] reliability, things become difficult. Albeit has been long argued even after Isaac Asimov’s “Three
the less than 10 ms and 1 − 10 −2 are almost enough Laws of Robotics”. One of the widely discussed problems
for the majority of wireless communications, but not is the conflict of interactions between human verdict
in remote surgery. In addition, less latency and higher and robot command. For example, when faced with a
reliability always the mean the better performance and potential traffic accident, should the automatically drive
less operational risk. ambulance hit the pedestrian or avoid it even through
In reality, it is a dilemma to achieve the ultra-reliable it might cause some serious injury to its passengers?
connections and low latency communications. For ICT-assisted health systems also raise some pitfalls
example, hybrid automatic repeat request (HARQ) to the ethics, e.g., patient-doctor relationship erosion,
re-transmissions is a good choice for higher reliability, threat to patient information privacy. If this and
but it will cause higher latency performance [10]. similar ethic dilemmas cannot be perfectly solved, we
Most of the existing works on low latency divide the may not be able to largely and widely implement the
information into short packets, which will generate ICT-assisted health systems. The rapidly and even
network jams because of the large volume of short accelerating technical advances on AI and bio-robot
packets. In addition, the short packet strategy is raise new moral dilemmas, e.g., when the robot is
incapable of VR/AR streaming media information intelligent enough, shall we treat it (or him/she) as a
transmission. This is because AR/VR streaming media human or just a robot?
information transmission requires intensive computing
and a large packet transmission strategy. Recently 4. FUTURE RESEARCH TRENDS OF THE
transmission without guarantee emerges as a hot topic 5G-ENABLED HEALTH SYSTEMS
in terms of low latency [11]. However, since there is no
We focus on the future research trends of 5G-enabled
transmission guarantee, transmission reliability will be
health systems in this section. Due to the author’s
reduced. In this case, for the URLLC requirements,
background, we mainly talk about the 5G NR
some trade-off strategies might be more reasonable
technologies and network architecture redesigning topics
choices [12].
here.
Besides, URLLC solely for the wireless access part might
be easy, yet it will be difficult from the whole network
4.1 5G new radio technology
perspective. Redesigning the network architecture is
required in this regard. For the upper layer technologies, As discussed before, eMBB, mMTC and URLLC
mobile edge computing can offload the network load to are inevitable elements of the 5G-enabled health
edge server, reduce the distance from the subscriber systems to transmit high-definition streaming media
to the vendor and provide edge computing ability for data, to connect more devices to monitor the
signal processing at the edge side. It thus can greatly vital signs, and to reduce the response time. In
enhance latency performance [12]. Network slicing literature, massive multi-input multi-output (MIMO),
is emerging as a promising technology for the new non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) and full duplex
network architecture design and URLLC requirements. (FD) are some emerging technologies to accomplish the
It can create some delegate network slicing services eMBB, mMTC and URLLC requirements. For instance,
for specific applications. In network slicing studies, in the work of [6], it is proved that with antenna numbers
substantial works are still needed, for instance, the increasing, uncorrelated noise and fast fading effects
routing algorithm, labeling method, file division and have vanished. Increasing the antenna numbers also
cache strategy, orchestration of various network slicing leads to less required transmitted power per bit, which
pieces. yields better capacity and faster transmission rates per
user. However, the merits of massive MIMO are greatly
3.2 Ethics of 5G-enabled health systems hampered by the pilot contamination. Novel precoding
and beam-forming algorithms are good topics for future
The ethics of 5G-enabled health systems is another research on massive MIMO.
challenging issue on its implementation. As we know, Asides from massive MIMO, NOMA is another
a remote surgery robot has contributed to the greater emerging 5G technology. It utilizes the superposition

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