At the 8th Global Mobile Broadband Forum, Huawei Wireless X Labs and MGI signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) on wireless telemedicine.In 2018, the two parties will work together to provide wireless remote ultrasonic diagnosis applications based on Huawei’s wireless connection technologies and MGI’s remote ultrasonic diagnosis system. It will be the industry’s first use of mobile network technologies in real-time operation applications for telemedicine.
Healthcare resources are becoming an increasingly serious issue worldwide. There are even less healthcare resources in remote or hard to access areas, such as plateaus, distant frontiers, disaster-stricken areas, or on the open sea. Telemedicine can eliminate geographical limitations. Doctors and patients no longer need to be in the same room. Patients can spend less time and money traveling to access medical care, and the medical experts can work more efficiently.
The telemedicine applications related to remote real-time operations, such as remote ultrasonic detection or remote surgery, are difficult to implement due to their requirements for high bandwidth and low latency. For example, the movements of the doctor’s hands, the image transmission, and the force feedback must be tightly synchronised, which is hard to realise under the current network conditions.
To resolve this issue, Huawei Wireless X Labs and MGI will use 4.5G and 5G network technologies to provide data connections for remote ultrasonic robots. This will enable doctors to control ultrasonic probes on the patient side for diagnosis. 4.5G and 5G network provide plenty of bandwidth.
They can provide dozens of megabits per second for onsite audio, video, and B-mode ultrasonic examination images. The low latency boasted by 4.5G and 5G networks ensures that the force feedback from patient sensors transmitted to their doctor’s touch sensitive devices in just milliseconds. With 4.5G and 5G networks, ultrasonic images can be transmitted to the cloud for real-time analysis to assist with diagnosis at multiple levels.
Speaking of the cooperation, Zhou Yuefeng, CMO of Huawei Wireless Network Product Line, remarked, “Innovations in wireless communications technologies create new possibilities for the healthcare industry. Wireless X Labs will join hands with industry partners to innovate together and to accelerate the digital transformation of the entire healthcare industry”.
Liu Jian, vice president of MGI, said, “MGI’s newly released remote ultrasonic diagnosis system breaks through the boundaries presented by traditional ultrasonic diagnosis, and saves both time and space. We will work with Huawei and other partners to help balance healthcare resources and integrate genetic data with image data, bringing high-quality, precision healthcare services to everyone”.
The 2017 Global Mobile Broadband Forum was held in London on November 15th and 16th, 2017. For more details, please click here
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