6G in Medical Robotics: Development of Network Allocation Strategies for a Telerobotic Examination System

Purpose: Healthcare systems around the world are increasingly facing severe challenges due to problems such as staff shortage, changing demographics and the reliance on an often strongly human-dependent environment. One approach aiming to address these issues is the development of new telemedicine applications. The currently researched network standard 6G promises to deliver many new features which could be beneficial to leverage the full potential of emerging telemedical solutions and overcome the limitations of current network standards. Methods: We developed a telerobotic examination system with a distributed robot control infrastructure to investigate the benefits and challenges of in- network computing in medical applications. We investigate different software configurations for which we characterize the network traffic and computational loads, and subsequently establish network allocation strategies for various robotic subtasks. Results: The results indicate a high variability in the usage profiles of these subtasks, both in terms of computational load and networking behavior, which in turn allows the development of allocation strategies for specific software nodes according to their requirements. Furthermore, the results provide a strong basis for further exploration of in-network computing in medical robotics. Conclusion: This work lays the foundation for the development of medical robotic applications using 6G and in-network computing, and shall hopefully play a role in addressing the increasingly critical challenges in healthcare.     «

Purpose: Healthcare systems around the world are increasingly facing severe challenges due to problems such as staff shortage, changing demographics and the reliance on an often strongly human-dependent environment. One approach aiming to address these issues is the development of new telemedicine applications. The currently researched network standard 6G promises to deliver many new features which could be beneficial to leverage the full potential of emerging telemedical solutions and overcome...     »