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

Telerobotic Pointing Gestures Shape Human Spatial Cognition

This paper aimed to explore whether human beings can understand gestures produced by telepresence robots. If it were the case, they can derive meaning conveyed in telerobotic gestures when processing spatial information. We conducted two experiments over Skype in the present study. Participants were presented with a robotic interface that had arms, which were teleoperated by an experimenter. The robot could point to virtual locations that represented certain entities. In Experiment 1, the experimenter described spatial locations of fictitious objects sequentially in two conditions: speech condition (SO, verbal descriptions clearly indicated the spatial layout) and speech and gesture condition (SR, verbal descriptions were ambiguous but accompanied by robotic pointing gestures). Participants were then asked to recall the objects' spatial locations. We found that the number of spatial locations recalled in the SR condition was on par with that in the SO condition, suggesting that telerobotic pointing gestures compensated ambiguous speech during the process of spatial information. In Experiment 2, the experimenter described spatial locations non-sequentially in the SR and SO conditions. Surprisingly, the number of spatial locations recalled in the SR condition was even higher than that in the SO condition, suggesting that telerobotic pointing gestures were more powerful than speech in conveying spatial information when information was presented in an unpredictable order. The findings provide evidence that human beings are able to comprehend telerobotic gestures, and importantly, integrate these gestures with co-occurring speech. This work promotes engaging remote collaboration among humans through a robot intermediary.Comment: 27 pages, 7 figure

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

Minimally Invasive Expeditionary Surgical Care Using Human-Inspired Robots

This technical report serves as an updated collection of subject matter experts on surgical care using human-inspired robotics for human exploration. It is a summary of the Blue Sky Meeting, organized by the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition (IHMC), Pensacola, Florida, and held on October 2-3, 2018. It contains an executive summary, the final report, all of the presentation materials, and an updated reference list

Breaking the Barriers to Specialty Care: Practical Ideas to Improve Health Equity and Reduce Cost - Striving for Equity in Specialty Care Full Report

Tremendous health outcome inequities remain in the U.S. across race and ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation, socio-economic status, and geography—particularly for those with serious conditions such as lung or skin cancer, HIV/AIDS, or cardiovascular disease.These inequities are driven by a complex set of factors—including distance to a specialist, insurance coverage, provider bias, and a patient's housing and healthy food access. These inequities not only harm patients, resulting in avoidable illness and death, they also drive unnecessary health systems costs.This 5-part series highlights the urgent need to address these issues, providing resources such as case studies, data, and recommendations to help the health care sector make meaningful strides toward achieving equity in specialty care.Top TakeawaysThere are vast inequalities in access to and outcomes from specialty health care in the U.S. These inequalities are worst for minority patients, low-income patients, patients with limited English language proficiency, and patients in rural areas.A number of solutions have emerged to improve health outcomes for minority and medically underserved patients. These solutions fall into three main categories: increasing specialty care availability, ensuring high-quality care, and helping patients engage in care.As these inequities are also significant drivers of health costs, payers, health care provider organizations, and policy makers have a strong incentive to invest in solutions that will both improve outcomes and reduce unnecessary costs. These actors play a critical role in ensuring that equity is embedded into core care delivery at scale.

Telehealth in the developing world

Co-published with the Royal Society of Medicine Pres

Investigating the Use of M-Health for Learning and Clinical Training by Medical Students in Ghana

There is a challenge with healthcare access in most developing countries. With the high rate of mobile technology penetration in these countries, there is a strong belief that mobile technology can help address this and other health system and education challenges. This study investigated how clinical year medical students in Ghana used m-health and with what outcomes. This was a mixed-methods study to assess what technologies students used, what the impact of use was, what enablers and barriers they encountered, what factors explained m-health adoption and what the attitudes of students, staff and faculty members were towards m-health use. The study was conducted in four out of five medical schools in Ghana with clinical year students, namely, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology School of Medical Sciences (KNUST-SMS), University of Cape Coast School of Medical Sciences (UCC-SMS), University of Development Studies School of Medicine and Health Sciences (UDS-SMHS) and University of Ghana School of Medicine and Dentistry (UG-SMD). Online and paper questionnaires were distributed to 828 students and 291 questionnaires were returned. Questionnaires from dental students at UG-SMD (n = 5) were excluded from the analysis.Two focus group discussions were held involving seven students while three students, seven faculty members and five staff were interviewed. Qualitative data were analyzed using thematic analysis. Only one student did not own a mobile device. About 78% of students reported using m-health at some point during their medical education. The most popular devices used by students were laptop computers (90.8%), smartphones (66.2%), cellular phones (46.6%) and tablets (44.1%). Over 84% of the students owned Android devices, while 21% owned iPhones and iPads. Majority of students owned three devices or less. Students used mobile technologies in ways that suited their learning needs and contexts. M-health helped students to participate better in lessons and improve their knowledge, skills and efficiency in various contexts. The main drawbacks of m-health use were distraction and time wasting, difficulty in determining credibility of some online information and the risk of using these technologies inappropriately around patients and during assessments. The main facilitating conditions for m-health use were availability, quality and reliability of technological services, technical support, security, price value, technology competence and training, portability, task and goal fit, social influence and organizational factors. Habit and Hedonic Motivation were the only significant factors that explained intention to use m-health and actual m-health use respectively in the UTAUT2 model, in the presence of age, gender and experience. Students, staff and faculty members were open to using m-health in teaching and learning, although they recommended regulation of use through policies and guidelines to ensure effective teaching and learning and ethical m-health use. Considering the benefits offered by m-health, the study encourages medical schools in Ghana to explore mobile learning with the possibility of incorporating it into their curricula. This should be accompanied by development of policies and guidelines to spell out how mobile technologies should be used in order to mitigate most of the drawbacks identified. This study contributed empirical evidence from the Ghanaian context regarding m-health adoption and use in medical education. This evidence will contribute to theory regarding benefits, drawbacks, facilitating conditions and factors that influence m-health adoption among medical students in a developing country context. Understanding how medical students use mobile technology in learning will be useful in planning how m-health can be incorporated into their curricula. It will also help in informing development and deployment of m-health in healthcare in contexts similar to Ghana

Human-Centred Evaluation of Broadband Telehealth for Tertiary Outpatient Consultations: A Case Study Approach

Outpatient consultations form a large part of the healthcare of patients at tertiary hospitals, both as a precursor to in-patient treatment and for the management of on-going health conditions or long-term rehabilitation and monitoring after treatment. These outpatient consultations are generally conducted at the hospitals, most often located in large cities. Patients who live outside these cities face extensive travel to attend these consultations, placing a burden on themselves and on their families or carers. An ability of a tertiary hospital to deliver outpatient consultations in a telehealth mode to regional or remote locations closer to the patients’ homes would potentially relieve much of this burden of travel. ¶ ... ¶ In this thesis I use a case-study-based approach to evaluate the development and pilot trial of a broadband telehealth system in a tertiary paediatric context. I use the data from these case studies to explore the way that a human-centred approach can be used to evaluate outpatient telehealth trials at a tertiary level of healthcare. ..