Healing Hands: The Tactile Internet in Future Tele-Healthcare

Abstract

In the early 2020s, the coronavirus pandemic brought the notion of remotely connected care to the general population across the globe. Oftentimes, the timely provisioning of access to and the implementation of affordable care are drivers behind tele-healthcare initiatives. Tele-healthcare has already garnered significant momentum in research and implementations in the years preceding the worldwide challenge of 2020, supported by the emerging capabilities of communication networks. The Tactile Internet (TI) with human-in-the-loop is one of those developments, leading to the democratization of skills and expertise that will significantly impact the long-term developments of the provisioning of care. However, significant challenges remain that require today’s communication networks to adapt to support the ultra-low latency required. The resulting latency challenge necessitates trans-disciplinary research efforts combining psychophysiological as well as technological solutions to achieve one millisecond and below round-trip times. The objective of this paper is to provide an overview of the benefits enabled by solving this network latency reduction challenge by employing state-of-the-art Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) devices in a testbed, realizing the service differentiation required for the multi-modal human-machine interface. With completely new types of services and use cases resulting from the TI, we describe the potential impacts on remote surgery and remote rehabilitation as examples, with a focus on the future of tele-healthcare in rural settings.

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“…For example, specialist teleconsultation between doctors operating in different parts of the world is a very important application that would allow to break down the geographical boundaries of knowledge, making the experience and skills of medical luminaries available everywhere. Remote surgery, which can be defined as the telehealthcare service thanks to which a doctor can perform surgery at long distances from the patient [36], is an example of an application that asks for stringent requirements in terms of latency, security, and reliability in order to be widely diffused and that, therefore, would greatly enjoy the support of future 6G networks. A different use of technology in support of healthcare is shown in [37], where the benefits of applying VR for motor rehabilitation are deeply described.…”

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“…Senk et al [ 6 ] deal with Tactile Internet (TI) with human-in-the-loop, an improvement in tele-healthcare that is expected to positively impact care provisioning. One of the TI challenges lies in the need for ultra-low latency.…”