Smart Emergency Healthcare Outdoor First Aid enabled by 5G

Imagine you are walking in a public area and suddenly meet with an accident. You start bleeding profusely and want nothing more than to be taken to the hospital as soon as possible to get treated. Time is of the essence. The time elapsed between the traumatic injury and the treatment given to you at the hospital can make the difference between life and death. 5G can play a crucial role here. Let us see how.

In traditional emergency care, the patient is taken to the hospital by an ambulance. The patient receives only basic preliminary diagnosis on the ambulance, such as vitals monitoring. This data is may or may not be sent to the hospital. When the patient reaches the hospital’s emergency ward, higher-level diagnosis is performed by the ER staff, such as taking ultrasound scans or glucometer readings. After some time, the correct procedures are prescribed for the patient. The whole process takes a lot of time, and in critical cases, may lead to the patient’s demise.

Using 5G technologies, critical time can be saved by having large amounts of patient data transmitted in real-time from the ambulance to the hospital. The hospital’s ER ward is ready to receive the patient, who can then be taken to the next stage of treatment. The sequence of events is depicted in figure 1.

It has become a common practice for cities to set up medical stations in major public places. When a person meets with an accident (say, he is hit by a car or falls down a flight of stairs), nearby citizens can take him to a nearby medical station. The patient receives preliminary diagnosis at the medical station, which also promptly dispatches an ambulance from a nearby hospital or the city emergency services. The ambulance arrives and carries the patient to the hospital. This is no ordinary ambulance but a 5G-enabled smart ambulance. It is equipped with medical equipment such as ultrasound instrument, ECG monitor, glucometer, etc. The caregiver on the ambulance can monitor the patient’s condition and take measurements such as ultrasound and ECG scans, respirator data, etc. (which otherwise would be performed when the patient reaches the hospital). The massive amount of 8K/4K high definition audio and video data generated needs to be transmitted to the hospital in real-time, that too with the ambulance driving through the city roads at a fast speed. Current 4G networks cannot transmit this amount of data in real-time. If 4G networks are used, the videos would be received at the hospital with a significant lag and choppy quality, making any meaningful diagnosis impossible. The loss of a couple of frames could lead to misdiagnosis. 5G networks’ eMBB (enhanced mobile broadband) and uRLLC (ultra-reliable low latency communication) capabilities can ensure that the hospital receives high-quality videos without any perceptible lag. eMBB means that 5G provides very high bandwidth speeds, theoretically, up to 20 Gbps in the downlink. With uRLLC, data can be received with millisecond latency, which is essential for mission-critical use cases such as emergency outdoor first aid.

5G networks can also handle the multi-party communication between the medical station, ambulance and the hospital to facilitate seamless transmission of patient data over the MEC medical cloud. The data that the hospital receives from the ambulance is helpful to them. They can analyze the data, with medical experts also joining in from afar and decide on the next course of action. AI and ML algorithms can also be used to recommend the treatment. When the patient arrives at the hospital, he can be immediately taken to the next stage of treatment. No time is wasted in processes like verifying patient identity, viewing his past medical records, and taking vital measurements such as ultrasound scans, as the hospital already has that information handy. (Since the patient is newly admitted into the hospital, the question arises as to how to obtain his past medical records. For this, concerned stakeholders such as hospitals, the government and the citizens may have to come together to create a centralized database of all the residents and their past medical records from birth till present date, which can be accessed by authorized personnel such as medical staff. It can be implemented in various ways such as using digi locker to store patient EMR or having a consortium of hospitals that store the records on a decentralized private permissioned blockchain.)

The benefits of emergency outdoor first aid enabled by 5G are listed in figure 2.

An emerging paradigm in telecommunication technologies is ‘network slicing’. Network slicing implies that telecom operators can partition the network into mutually exclusive partitions called ‘slices’, all sitting on the same physical network resources. Each slice can be configured to have its own Quality of Service (QoS) parameters, depending on the end user requirement. Network slicing guarantees that the service parameters are always met, ensuring quality of service. The adoption of 5G networks worldwide is expected to accelerate applications of network slicing. In the emergency healthcare scenario, dedicated eMBB + uRLLC network slice can be created for patient data transmission.

Let’s have a look at some real-life applications of 5G networks for emergency rescue.

Case Study 1: China’s First 5G Emergency Rescue Solution

The telecom operator China Mobile worked with the First Affiliated Hospital of Zhengzhou University to develop a 5G emergency rescue solution for mobile application. They equipped an ambulance with terminals that can be used to view the patient’s Electronic Medical Records (EMR). Vehicle-mounted medical equipment continuously monitors the patient’s vitals and exchanges the data with remote experts over long distances using vehicle-mounted cameras. This solution enables image sharing and expert mobile consultation, improving the quality of pre-hospital care.

Case Study 2: O2 Smart Ambulance to revolutionize patient treatment

The British telecom operator O2 partnered with Samsung, Visionable and Launchcloud to test the smart ambulance application. O2 provided the 5G network for the ambulances fitted with medical devices manufactured by Samsung’s healthcare division, transforming the ambulance into a unique remote consultation room. Samsung also provided tablets, mobile phones and curved screens for communication and viewing patient data. Visionable provided the video collaboration software, and Launchcloud provided a versatile data collection application for asset tracking and compliance check. Visionable’s patented pixel-for-pixel picture quality allows for clearer and accurate medical scans. The trial is being conducted at Millbrook Proving Ground in Bedford. The setup will help a network of seven hospitals connect with a stroke consultant to assist in the decision making for thrombolysis for patients suffering from stroke. According to Lynda Sibson, Stroke Telemedicine Manager at East of England Stroke Medicine Partnership, “When someone has a stroke, every minute counts. We have been successfully working with Visionable to bring critical stroke care to patients wherever they are, bringing life-saving treatment and diagnosis to thousands of people across East of England.”

REFERENCES

1. ‘5G Application Scenarios White Paper’, China Mobile, November 2019

2. ‘5G Smart Cities Whitepaper’, Deloitte and China Unicom, June 2020

3.https://news.o2.co.uk/press-release/o2-developing-smart-ambulance-trial-to-revolutionise-patient-treatment-and-reduce-hospital-numbers/

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