6G Connected Health
6G will be transformational in empowering wireless, smart, and connected health. Advances in monitoring, diagnostics and treatment, i.e., both proactive and reactive care and precision medicine will finally be in reach with the technological advancements 6G will bring. Examples include: (a) seamless wearables for continuous vitals monitoring in dynamic real-world settings, (b) miniaturized implants embedded via minimally invasive procedures in-vivo and for brain-computer interfaces, (c) the internet of medical things, including in-body, on-body, off-body communications and combinations thereof, as well as hospital to home services, (d) artificial intelligence towards proactive and adaptive healthcare models on a personalized basis, (e) cyber-physical systems with human in the loop ranging from body area networks to operating room environments, (f) intelligence ambulance services and finally (g) remote surgeries in semi or fully autonomous settings even in remote locations in the world.
These advancements will be possible with the realization of ultra-reliable and low-latency communications in smart environments; programmable networks and native AI; and augmented reality and holographic communications (metaverse).
Several challenges need to be addressed before this transformational impact in medicine becomes a reality. From device design to collecting and fusing diverse types of data, ensuring privacy and security, addressing data ownership, handling the traffic capacity, minimizing power consumption, and more, interdisciplinary teams with in-depth expertise in the subject disciplines will be of paramount importance to success.
At Ohio State, we are in the forefront of Connected Health for 6G. Our expertise of our outstanding engineering faculty includes, but is not limited to, communications with energy harvesting and wirelessly powered micro-nano scale sensors, ultra-reliable ultra-low-latency wireless communications, seamless wearables and implants for unmet clinical needs, advanced biomedical signal processing, and artificial intelligence for a plurality of medical applications. We are also uniquely positioned in terms of interdisciplinary expertise as one of the few Universities across the country with co-located Colleges of Engineering, Medicine, Nursing, and Veterinary Medicine.
