Healthcare Built Environment and Telemedicine Practice for Social and Environmental Sustainability

The practice of telemedicine started at the beginning of the 20th century but has never been widely implemented, even though it is significantly sustainable compared to traveling to healthcare However, the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic pushed organisations and patients to accept this technology. During the pandemic, telemedicine consultations took place in ad hoc environments without much preparation and planning. As a result, there is a knowledge gap in the field between telemedicine’s clinical care services and healthcare built environment, in terms of design. This research focused on addressing the quality of service and experience of telemedicine in primary healthcare settings and how this could be influenced by the digital infrastructure. Our aim was to understand the correlations between telemedicine and healthcare built environment and whether the latter could have a significant impact on telemedicine practice. The methodology included interviews with professionals involved in healthcare planning, architecture and ethnography, and end user research involving telemedicine sessions. The interviews highlighted that professionals involved in the design of healthcare environments demonstrated limited consideration of telemedicine environments. Yet, the ethnographic, end-user research identified areas where the telemedicine environment could affect user experience and should be taken into consideration in the design of such spaces

5G Smart and innovative Healthcare services: opportunities, challenges and prospective solutions

Due to its abilities to boost productivity, reduce costs and enhance user experiences, smart healthcare is widely recognised as a potential solution to reduce pressures on existing health systems. Since the new era of 5G will unite enhanced connectivity, improved cloud-based storage and interconnection of an array of devices and services, a massive boost in the digital transformation of healthcare is expected. In this transformation process, healthcare services such as medical diagnosis, treatment and remote surgery will be facilitated by a range of technologies such as Internet of Things, Robotics and Artificial Intelligence, among others, that will advance further under 5G. Moreover, real-time health services will become a reality and will offer people with quality care and improved experiences. On the other hand, different challenges can hinder the proliferation of 5G smart and innovative healthcare solutions, including security and heterogeneous devices. This chapter presents how 5G will boost digital transformation of healthcare through delivery and consumption of smart and innovative healthcare services, while probing into key hurdles in the process as well as prospective solutions

Health-5G: A Mixed Reality-Based System for Remote Medical Assistance in Emergency Situations

Mixed reality is the combination of virtual and augmented reality to interactively and believably merge physical and computer-generated environments. This paper discusses the design of Health5G, a scalable mixed reality-based system that facilitates and supports emergency response by medical emergency teams. Health-5G is supported by a distributed architecture divided into four interrelated applications responsible for advanced computer-human interaction, effective real-time videoconference, medical device integration, and communication infrastructure, respectively. The mixed reality layer is provided by the headset Microsoft Hololens 2™. Health-5G is based on scenarios in which emergency personnel wear mixed reality glasses that can transmit audio, video, and data streams bidirectionally over a 5G network to medical specialists stationed in a hospital at any distance. Thanks to Health-5G, the specialist will be able to access the emergency team’s point of view at any time and provide verbal and visual instructions, including gestures and positioning of graphical markers in 3D space. In this way, emergency personnel can provide the best possible care to the patient without having to wait for them to arrive at the hospital, saving a lot of time in scenarios where every second can make a difference. Health-5G also addresses the integration of medical devices and the collection of the patient’s medical data in a scalable way through optical character recognition. A case study is discussed where Health-5G is used to attend a patient in the street suffering from syncope due to third-degree atrioventricular block. Latency and performance tests over a 5G network are also discussed. To the best of our knowledge, there is no comprehensive solution in the literature that provides all the capabilities offered by Health-5G in terms of functionality and advanced interaction mechanisms within the context of remote, immersive support in emergency situations

IoMT Supported COVID Care – Technologies and Challenges

The Internet of Things (IoT) has sparked substantial progress in the recent days of pandemic and achieved several milestones especially in healthcare. Wearable technologies have gained in popularity as a means of ensuring the health and safety of users in medical and disaster relief activities, facilitating the evolution of the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT). The IoMT is a phenomenon in which computer networks and medical equipment are linked over the Internet to allow physicians and patients to interact in real time. This coronavirus pandemic has demonstrated how unprepared our systems are for a disaster of this magnitude, as well as the necessity for robust, computationally intelligent, and profound meddling. This study piece looks at the many IoT-enabled smart solutions that could be used to respond to various aspects of this rising epidemic, from diagnosis to treatment to prevention. The paper provides a retrospective survey and identifies several obstacles and obstructions to IoT integration as an attempt to deal with coronavirus pandemic. The work concludes with a discussion of challenges and future scope to the difficulties mentioned in the bench marked works

Techno-economic viability of integrating satellite communication in 4G networks to bridge the broadband digital divide

Bridging the broadband digital divide between urban and rural areas in Europe is one of the main targets of the Digital Agenda for Europe. Though many technological options are proposed in literature, satellite communication has been identified as the only possible solution for the most rural areas, due to its global coverage. However, deploying an end-to-end satellite solution might, in some cases, not be cost-effective. The aim of this study is to give insights into the economic effectiveness of integrating satellite communications into 4G networks in order to connect the most rural areas (also referred to as white areas) in Europe. To this end, this paper proposes a converged solution that combines satellite communication as a backhaul network with 4G as a fronthaul network to bring enhanced broadband connectivity to European rural areas, along with a techno-economic model to analyse the economic viability of this integration. The model is based on a Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) model for 5 years, taking into account both capital and operational expenditures, and aims to calculate the TCO as well as the Average Cost Per User (ACPU) for the studied scenarios. We evaluate the suggested model by simulating a hypothetical use case for two scenarios. The first scenario is based on a radio access network connecting to the 4G core network via a satellite link. Results for this scenario show high operational costs. In order to reduce these costs, we propose a second scenario, consisting of caching the popular content on the edge to reduce the traffic carried over the satellite link. This scenario demonstrates a significant operational cost decrease (more than 60%), which also means a significant ACPU decrease. We evaluate the robustness of the results by simulating for a range of population densities, hereby also providing an indication of the economic viability of our proposed solution across a wider range of areas