Towards 5G in Healthcare: a path from research to innovation

September 14, 2017 – Today, the healthcare sector is characterized by a growing demand for technologically advanced solutions in both public and private facilities.

The main goal is to control the exponential growth of healthcare expenditure across Europe.

The application of ICT technologies to the clinical and care context is essential to achieve this objective, as well as to increase diagnostic accuracy, expand remote patient management, and improve quality of life.

Italtel is actively engaged in research and innovation activities in Italy and across Europe, particularly in the fields of 5G and the Internet of Things (IoT).

Our European 5G projects – SESAME, 5G ESSENCE, 5G CITY, and MATILDA – developed under the Horizon 2020 program, are contributing to the evolution of our product and solution portfolio.

In this context, the new 5G-based architecture (such as CRAN and MEC) plays a crucial role, along with key performance requirements – low latency, high data volume, and broad bandwidth coverage – that enable next-generation digital healthcare services.

Moreover, Italtel has recently developed a new digital healthcare solution called DoctorLINK — an open healthcare platform, delivered as a managed service, designed to ensure continuity of care at home through a constant, reliable, and secure communication channel between patient and hospital.

DoctorLINK combines biological data, real-time communication, and health IT infrastructure.

It currently supports use cases such as home hospitalization, chronic disease management, elderly care, remote check-ups, and follow-up visits enriched with biological data, ensuring greater diagnostic precision and remote treatment accuracy.

The next key developments, in collaboration with major national communication providers, will focus on tele-diagnosis and tele-rehabilitation, based on an approach that allows medical action anywhere and anytime.

The objective is to make possible even remote physical examinations, including tactile feedback (palpation), through real-time communications with minimal end-to-end latency.

Future applications will also include advanced remote patient monitoring in critical conditions, enabled by ultra-reliable communication networks, and automated or personalized therapeutic responses, supported by smart notifications and adaptive alerts directly on patient devices.