ABSTRACT
Since the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) began in 2020, it has changed the way people live such as social life and healthcare. One of the simplest ways to avoid wide spread of the virus is to minimize physical contact and avoid going to a crowded place. Besides that, it also has prompted countries across the world to employ digital technologies such as wireless communication systems to combat this global crisis. Digital healthcare is one of the solutions that play a crucial role to support the healthcare sector in order to prevent and minimize physical contact through telehealth and telemedicine such as monitoring, diagnosis and patient care. 5G network has the potential to advance digital healthcare along with its key technology such as enhanced Mobile Broadband (eMBB), Ultra Reliable and Low Latency Communication (URLLC), and massive Machine Type Communication (mMTC). Despite the benefits of digital healthcare by leveraging the 5G technology, there are still challenges to be overcome such as privacy protection issues, 5G deployment and limited connectivity. In this review, it highlights the relevance and challenges of 5G wireless cellular networks for digital healthcare during the COVID-19 pandemic. It also provides potential solutions and future research areas for researchers on 5G to reduce COVID-19 related health risks.
ABSTRACT
This study proposes and develops a secured edge-assisted deep learning (DL)-based automatic COVID-19 detection framework that utilizes the cloud and edge computing assistance as a service with a 5G network and blockchain technologies. The development of artificial intelligence methods through services at the edge plays a significant role in serving many applications in different domains. Recently, some DL approaches have been proposed to successfully detect COVID-19 by analyzing chest X-ray (CXR) images in the cloud and edge computing environments. However, the existing DL methods leverage only local and small training datasets. To overcome these limitations, we employed the edges to perform three tasks. The first task was to collect data from different hospitals and send them to a global cloud to train a DL model on massive datasets. The second task was to integrate all the trained models on the cloud to detect COVID-19 cases automatically. The third task was to retrain the trained model on specific COVID-19 data locally at hospitals to improve and generalize the trained model. A feature-level fusion and reduction were adopted for model performance enhancement. Experimental results on a public CXR dataset demonstrated an improvement against recent related work, achieving the quality-of-service requirements. © 2023 by the authors.
ABSTRACT
OBJECTIVE: Ultrasound (US) plays an important role in the diagnosis and management of breast diseases; however, effective breast US screening is lacking in rural and remote areas. To alleviate this issue, we prospectively evaluated the clinical availability of 5G-based telerobotic US technology for breast examinations in rural and remote areas. METHODS: Between September 2020 and March 2021, 63 patients underwent conventional and telerobotic US examinations in a rural island (Scenario A), while 20 patients underwent telerobotic US examination in a mobile car located in a remote county (Scenario B) in May 2021. The safety, duration, US image quality, consistency, and acceptability of the 5G-based telerobotic US were assessed. RESULTS: In Scenario A, the average duration of the telerobotic US procedure was longer than that of conventional US (10.3 ± 3.3 min vs. 7.6 ± 3.0 min, p = 0.017), but their average imaging scores were similar (4.86 vs. 4.90, p = 0.159). Two cases of gynecomastia, one of lactation mastitis, and one of postoperative breast effusion were diagnosed and 32 nodules were detected using the two US methods. There was good interobserver agreement between the US features and BI-RADS categories of the identical nodules (ICC = 0.795-1.000). In Scenario B, breast nodules were detected in 65% of the patients using telerobotic US. Its average duration was 10.1 ± 2.3 min, and the average imaging score was 4.85. Overall, 90.4% of the patients were willing to choose telerobotic US in the future, and tele-sonologists were satisfied with 85.5% of the examinations. CONCLUSION: The 5G-based telerobotic US system is feasible for providing effective breast examinations in rural and remote areas.
ABSTRACT
The world has not been the same since the global outbreak of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). The disease has affected virtually every facet of the economies and social life and events of striving countries across the globe. Several conspiracy theories have been established on the origin, scope, prevention, management of the pandemic, including links to 5G development. This has led to the creation of an "infodemic" about the pandemic. The objective of the study was to examine people's perceptions of the link between COVID-19 and the 5G network, interpret their attitude towards the pandemic, and analyse possible ways of managing the infodemic crisis in Nigeria. The Symbolic interactionism theory was used to examine the constructed meanings attached to the evolving 5G network and the dynamics of rejection, an action influenced by conspiracy theories associating with the 5G operation to the breakout of COVID-19. The study adopted a qualitative method to elicit data from purposively selected participants within FCT-Abuja, Nigeria. In this study, one of the main concepts of interactionism is the belief that people strive for something based on both the significance of events and the implications that arise from the cycle of socialization. As such, the study recommended improved peace journalism, which discourages fear and violence in media reporting at a time of global pandemic-engendered fear. Thus, the fears created by the deaths, lockdown and other effects of the pandemic could be managed through peace journalism. © 2022 by the Author(s).
ABSTRACT
In the conditions of the COVID-19 pandemic, techniques and technologies represent important factors in the business of all companies, especially companies that deal with the collection and delivery of shipments. Reduced social distance during a pandemic directly affects new trends and ways of using technology in business, which accelerates and introduces new technologies such as IoT and 5G network in business. In this paper, the concept of 5G and IoT architecture is proposed, which can be used in all technological phases of postal traffic. The paper presents the possibilities and challenges of introducing IoT and 5G technology in postal traffic. Special attention in the paper is focused on the technological phases of collection and delivery of shipments, and changes that occur in the processes as a result of the introduction and integration of new technologies in postal traffic. © 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
ABSTRACT
– In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, where almost the entire global healthcare ecosystem struggled to handle patients, it’s evident that the healthcare segment needs a virtual real-time digital support system. The recent advancements in technology have enabled machine-to-machine communication, enhanced mobile broadband, and real-time biometric data analytics. These could potentially fulfill the requirements of an end-to-end digital healthcare system. For building such a system, there is also a need for a dedicated and specialized communication network. Such a system will not only support dynamic throughput, latency and payload but also provide guaranteed QoS (Quality of Service) at every instant. The motive of our study was to define an implementable low-level architecture for the digital healthcare system by using the 5G Network Slice that incorporates all these features. Best-in-class wearable devices will collect the biometric data and transmit it via the 5G network slice. Data analytics is then applied to the collected data to build a knowledge graph used for quick predictions and prescriptions. The architecture also keeps in mind the security and integrity aspects of healthcare data.
ABSTRACT
Telesurgery, or remote surgery, is widely known as a master-slave technology. It has achieved a milestone in surgical technology and intervention, providing widespread prospects of operating on a patient in a remote area with increased accuracy and precision. It consists of one or more arms controlled by a surgeon and a master controller in a remote area accessing all the information being transferred via a telecommunication system. This paper reviews the present advancements and their benefits and limitations in the field of telesurgery. A handful of operations have been done so far. However, due to time-lag (latency), global networking problems, legal issues and skepticism, and on top of the cost of robotic systems and their affordability have led to the concept of telerobotics and surgery to lag. However, with more information and high speed, 5G networking, which has been in a trial to reduce latency to its minimum, is beneficial. Haptic feedback technology in telesurgery and robotics is another achievement that can be improved; further, this allows the robotic arms to mimic the natural hand movements of the surgeon in the control center so that the master controller can perform surgeries with more dexterity and acuity. Due to coronavirus (COVID-19), this type of surgery approach can reduce the probability of contracting the virus, saving more lives and the future.