A new 5G eHealth architecture based on optical camera communication: An overview, prospects, and applications

Abstract

Currently, various radio frequency (RF) technologies are used to transfer medical data in healthcare applications. The electromagnetic interference caused by RF can critically affect the performance of medical devices. The main goal of this article, thus, is to provide reliable and low-latency fifth-generation (5G) electronic health (eHealth) solutions for monitoring patients at home, hospitals, ambulances, intensive care units, and outdoors. This monitoring is based on optical camera communication (OCC). In our proposal, the OCC system is used to receive the monitored data from wearable sensors/patches. OCC systems are connected to 5G access networks or wired networks to be linked with the core network. The proposed system is able to provide fast and secure connectivity for simultaneous monitoring of multiple patients. The monitored information is forwarded to hospitals, medical servers, doctors, cloud, and mobile systems for remote monitoring purposes. In this study, we provide a novel technical solution for monitoring patients remotely. A robot system with OCC is also proposed to monitor the health data of multiple patients in hospital. We provide several eHealth solution scenarios for better understanding of the proposed eHealth architecture.