Christoph Thuemmler: 5G on the road to Health 4.0

We are at the dawn of major transformations in healthcare as we move towards Health 4.0. How can 5G and IoT enable these transformations and what barriers need addressing to fully realise the benefits?
We captured key insights from Christoph Thuemmler, professor at Edinburgh Napier University and member of Global5G.org’s External Advisory Group, at the IEEE 5G Summit in Helsinki.

Here’s a summary of what he had to say.

Connected health, with a variety of use cases opens a whole new landscape of business opportunities for industry, new jobs and prosperity. With healthcare standing for 10% of budget of GDP in Europe, 5G health is an opportunity we cannot afford to miss.
“Health 4.0 is real-time connectivity between devices and to the virtual world”: a new business model is developing based on decentralised healthcare. The traditional one-to-one model (one doctor, one patient) is no longer viable because of demographic changes. This is also an opportunity to bring about significant improvements in patient’s quality of life, such as chronic disease management and assisted living for the ageing population.
 “5G will really be a game changer, enabling us to put population health management into practice”. It will enable the active interconnection among millions of IoT devices, exploiting the reliable, resilient and low-latency communication network.
Standardisation plays a fundamental role as only the capacity to seamlessly retrieve, interpret, analyse and process this huge quantity of health data will unlock the greatest opportunities for innovation in the coming years.
With the scaling of healthcare devices and sensors, we are at the dawn of the Industrial Internet of Things. The big players are already on the ball. “One of the greatest barriers to 5G health development is the lack of communication: relevant players need to fully understand the revolutionary benefits and opportunities of 5G”. It is crucial to bring people together from the telecommunications and from the healthcare sector enabling the former to fully understand the requirements and the latter to grasp the potential opportunities.
Watch the full interview here [link to the interview]
IEEE 5G Summit in Helsinki, September 2017