Joint project : 5G in operating rooms

Now dig­i­ti­za­tion has also reached hos­pi­tals. The basis for enter­ing the net­worked dig­i­tal world in white is fast and secure data com­mu­ni­ca­tion. A joint Ger­man-French project is now explor­ing the extent to which hos­pi­tals can ben­e­fit from their own net­work that oper­ates accord­ing to the mod­ern 5G mobile com­mu­ni­ca­tions stan­dard. It will be installed in oper­at­ing rooms at three hos­pi­tals. The goals are ambi­tious: With the help of wire­less tech­nol­o­gy, the basis for the clin­ic of the future is to be cre­at­ed, in which many pro­ce­dures that today still require con­sid­er­able per­son­nel input will be dig­i­tal­ly sup­port­ed or automated.

Continuous analysis of vital patient parameters

Mon­i­tor­ing vital signs in patients is cur­rent­ly in focus because of the Coro­na pan­dem­ic. Clin­i­cal staff are con­front­ed with a flood of acoustic and visu­al infor­ma­tion that some­times push­es them to their break­ing point. In the clin­ic of the future, all of the patients’ vital data will con­verge wire­less­ly in a cen­tral com­put­er, where it will be ana­lyzed by arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence in real time. In this way, hos­pi­tal staff in the oper­at­ing room or inten­sive care unit will be able to deter­mine where pri­or­i­ty action is need­ed. In the future, 5G tech­nol­o­gy will make it pos­si­ble to net­work a large num­ber of mobile devices in a very small space at the same time and with min­i­mal delays in com­mu­ni­ca­tion via mobile communications.

AI-supported analysis of images and video data from the operating room

AI can also pro­vide valu­able assis­tance with diag­nos­tic images or video sequences from the oper­at­ing room, for exam­ple, dur­ing endo­scop­ic surgery. AI eval­u­ates the images and sounds the alarm if com­pli­ca­tions are immi­nent. Here, 5G can pro­vide large band­widths for the huge vol­umes of data. At the same time, many appli­ca­tions can also be cal­cu­lat­ed direct­ly by edge com­put­ing, i.e. close to the patient instead of first hav­ing to be uploaded to the more dis­tant cloud.

Telesurgery thanks to real-time data

Even tele-surgery is pos­si­ble with the new tech­nol­o­gy, where­by the doc­tor can be locat­ed in a dif­fer­ent city or even a dif­fer­ent coun­try than the patient. From a dis­tance, he con­trols a robot and receives all the nec­es­sary data in real time. Thanks to inte­grat­ed robot­ic sen­sors, he can even feel resis­tance, for exam­ple dur­ing a nee­dle punc­ture. The 5G mode “Ultra Reli­able and Low Laten­cy Com­mu­ni­ca­tions” is used for trans­mis­sion. This mode offers low laten­cy com­bined with high reli­a­bil­i­ty, both of which are essen­tial for tele-surgery.

Parts provisioning” in the operating room by robots

In a fourth project, a mobile robot is to pro­vide all the nec­es­sary equip­ment, mate­ri­als and instru­ments in the oper­at­ing room to sup­port hos­pi­tal staff in a tar­get­ed man­ner. In mod­ern fac­to­ries, mobile sys­tems of this kind have long been dri­ving between the machines and pro­vid­ing the nec­es­sary sup­plies. How­ev­er, oper­at­ing rooms for such sys­tems rep­re­sent an envi­ron­ment with extreme require­ments in terms of pre­ci­sion, safe­ty, flex­i­bil­i­ty and reli­a­bil­i­ty. 5G cam­pus net­works offer a promis­ing solu­tion to meet these requirements.

Operating rooms in Strasbourg, Mannheim and Berlin

The 5G-OR project start­ed in Jan­u­ary and will run for three years. It is one of four win­ning projects joint­ly select­ed by the Fed­er­al Min­istry of Econ­o­my and Cli­mate Pro­tec­tion in Ger­many and the Min­istry of Econ­o­my, Finance and Recon­struc­tion in France for the “Tech­ni­cal devel­op­ments and appli­ca­tion ecosys­tems for 5G pri­vate net­works” call. Renowned com­pa­nies and insti­tutes are involved. For the Ger­man side, the Stuttgart-based Fraun­hofer Insti­tute for Man­u­fac­tur­ing Engi­neer­ing and Automa­tion IPA is in charge. Oper­at­ing rooms in Stras­bourg and Mannheim as well as at the Char­ité in Berlin are ready for prac­ti­cal implementation.