E-Health applications over 5G networks: challenges

and state of the art.

Enas Selem, Mohammed Fatehy Sherine M. Abd El-kader
Faculty of Science, Suez Canal University, Professor at Computers & Systems Dep at Electronics
Ismailia, Egypt 415221 Research Institute, Egypt 126113
enas.selem@yahoo.com Sherine@eri.sci.eg
mohammed.fatehy@science.suez.edu.eg

Abstract - Nowadays, the evolution of 5G technologies has a
great effect on different application varying from automotive
to real-time health care applications. Wireless Body Area
Network (WBAN) is considered as the prime technology
utilized for health care systems. This article presents an outline
of the intelligent employ of 5G technologies in a WBAN health
care application. As well as it gives advantages and
disadvantages of the integration of WBAN health care system
along with 5G and the architecture of WBAN based on 5G
technology. Additionally, the role of mm-wave in the
communication among WBAN and the role of 5G in
communicating WBAN to the outer world have been discussed.
Finally, various 5G health care application has been illustrated.
Index Terms - 5G technology, e-Health application, WBAN, IoT
device.
technology that is applied to continuous patient monitoring,
WBAN has various concerns such as energy efficiency,
latency in addition to security problems.
The integration of 5G along with WBANs can maintain
various features including energy saving, interference
reduction and the capability of wireless power transfer, very
low latency, and massive numbers of devices. All these
features make this integration more powerful way for
continuous health monitoring and the best possible solution
for remote health care applications [4]
The strength of 5G features could produce an important
enhancement in a lot of health applications, such as hospital
resources management, remote robotic surgery, and
applications of remote medication.

I. INTRODUCTION The rest of this paper is organized in such away. Section 2,

reviews the related research, in the meantime, in section 3
The fifth edition 5G wireless network is the following
WBAN health monitoring enabled by a 5G network is
achievement in the mobile communications, this fifth
discussed. In section 4, Millimetre-Wave: mm-Wave for 5G
edition networks will be available commercially within
communication is reviewed. In section 5, Health care
2020. The goal of this edition is to host a huge number of
application Scenarios based on 5G technology are presented
different types of devices, through the extreme growth of the
number of various devices, 5G networks will convert our
II. RELATED RESEARCH
world to a real Wi-Fi zone. The achievement of this
Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) is composed of a group
connectivity is fulfilled through offering major data rate,
of a huge number of sensor nodes that are spread randomly
little latency, and a great number of hosted devices [1].
to observe various tasks [5, 6, 7]. The cooperation between
Basically, 5G possesses a set of innovative applications that
WSN and Internet of Things (IoT) [8, 9,10] in several
can improve the lives of people, for instance, automated
remote health systems [11] has gained great attention from
homes, remote health care, driverless vehicles, and wireless
different research fields to grant the help to the patients in
robots, converting in such manner the actual world to tightly
urban regions with a cushy cost. However, WSNs are not
connected world [2]. Wireless Body Area Network
practical to meet specific requirements for the health care
(WBAN) is a novel technology used for medical systems
systems due to the special nature of the human body;
that would be “backbone” with the 5G networks. The basic
therefore, special Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs)
concept of WBAN is to monitor different biological metrics
have been proposed and attracted great interest in remote
by a set of sensors that are located in or on the body. The
health applications.
sensors detect vital parameters that are essential to be
This section presents a review of the remote health
monitored, for instance, heartbeats, blood pressure,
applications employing WBAN sensors, IoT devices, and
temperature …etc. They continuously send the sensed data
5G networks are outlined. First, this chapter reviews the
wirelessly to the receiver (I.e. mobile phone) which in turn
related work of the e-health system using IoT devices and
delivers it to a medical server [3]. The continuous
WBAN sensor nodes. In [12] multimedia sensors contained
monitoring and diagnosing of patients can save the lives of a
in smartphones for e-Health system and ambient assisted
lot of people. So, it reveals the importance of real-time
living is presented. This work shows the importance of
communication between WBAN’s patients and the medical
multimedia data for patient health monitoring and the types
servers [4]. Therefore, the utilization of 5G technology can
of these data that can be. In [13] a shoe-based wearable
enhance the health care system with a dramatical improve in
sensor platform is reviewed. This platform was capable of
the transmission rate and channel capacity. Additionally, it
characterizing patient activity, such as walking, running,
will achieve the real-time transmission of the data that will
sitting, standing, ascending\descending stairs… etc. In [14]
enable the WBANs to keep an eye on patients accurately
a smart collaborative design to observe elderly or disabled
[1]. In spite of the fact that WBAN is a challenging

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people was introduced. This design notes the change of the
person’s environment and based on this realizing the
person’s status. The system can evaluate the person’s data
in partnership with their neighbours. In [15] a WBAN for
continuous remote observing of epileptic patients was
presented. This system enabled high data accuracy and
prolonged battery lifetime to allow continuous monitoring.
In [16] mobile -based common fall detection architecture
was proposed. The implementation of this architecture was
done by Android G1 phone. This system was compared with
other systems and achieved efficient power consumption
and great detection performance. In [17], a monitoring
system that controls daily activities is proposed. In this
platform, the accelerometers enabled in elderly people’s
smartphones were used to continually monitor them. By
controlling elderly people's activity, the control of their
liveliness enables the system to take the proper action such
as rehabilitation exercises as well as detecting emergency
situations. WBAN monitoring application is introduced in
[18]. In this monitoring application, vital data are sensed
like blood pressure, temperature and heart rate... etc. This
sensed data are transmitted to the base station. As soon as
an emergency case has been discovered, an alarm is
produced and e-mail or SMS is delivered to the doctor. A
WBASN depends on a smart shirt for activity observing and
ubiquitous health is proposed in [19]. This smart shirt was
able to attain acceleration data and electrocardiogram for
real-time monitoring. The monitored data was sent to a base
station over an ad-hoc network for remote surveillance. In
[20] a cardiac risk monitor system enabled by WBAN and
IoT devices was proposed. The continuous data of
electrocardiogram (ECG) was evaluated by the IoT device.
This data allows the determination of the patients’ status and
determine if the patient requires additional help. The IoT
device can give an alert to the doctor or call the ambulance.
In addition, the IoT devices can be available to the patients
to decrease their danger. Some applications have been
developed to monitor patient’s health from their homes as in
[21, 22]. Altogether are depend on WBAN. The work
presented in [21] contains a remote warning button that
gives the doctors alert if needed. Ambient assisted living’
smart communication system has been proposed in [23].
The idea of this system is the importance of the alert button
to be activated manually to trigger the alarm in case of a risk
situation that cannot be noticed by the sensors. Although, in
some systems [22] the alarm is generated directly by the
panic button, however, this can cause jumble as the patient
suddenly generate a wrong alarm. To avoid wrong alarms,
the data resulted from the alert button have been reviewed,
hence the patient will get better attention as well as reduce
the cost. In [24] four-tiers architecture for remote health
monitoring systems is proposed in order to give the
possibilities of the mobility of mobile tiers. It considers the
mapping of the traffic among adjacent networks and
WBAN. In addition, it presents the priority weighted of the
round-robin scheduling method to organize the critical and
medical data. To support the mobility a handoff decision-
making technique is proposed.
Second, the role of 5G and machine learning techniques
integrated with WBANs in improving health care systems is
reviewed. The continuous monitoring of patients suffer
from chronic diseases enhances the life quality of those
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patients also it minimizes the costs of the health system,
however, the perfect monitoring requires a minimum delay
and wide bandwidth. This requirement can be fulfilled by
using the technology of 5G which ensure wider bandwidth
as well as reduces the delay and the loss of packets. In [25]
smart e-Health monitoring system for chronic patients is
presented. This system consists of on-body sensors which
used to measure medical data from the human body, which
in turn transmit it to the smart device located at the patient
via short-range communication such as Bluetooth. This
smart device is used for the processing of the data collected
from the on body sensors. Also, an intelligent system
equipped with a database is needed. The database of the
server gathers the data from the sensors besides other data
are gathered from hospitals, like the medical analytics and
the doctors’ decisions. Utilizing this collected data, the data
collected from the sensors is analyzed and classified as
typical Data (TD) or Abnormal Data (AD). As soon as an
abnormal condition is detected, the system generates an
alarm and the last 30 min of data is sent to the physician.
The heterogeneity of remote health monitoring systems
needs strong connections among participate modules.
Machine learning techniques are used in this system in order
to deal with the huge amount of data received from various
hospitals and from patients. Doctors use this data to
diagnose the disease as well as generate a warning in case of
abnormality conditions. In [26], this paper introduces the
main challenges in the communications of the wearable
device. It also presents a cloud/edge communication system
which used to combine the software-defined network, cloud
radio access network and the communications of device to
device in addition to the technologies of cloud/edge.
Wearable communications face some critical challenges like
a battery lifetime, restricted computation capability, and
strict latency. These challenges shall be relieved by this
cloud/edge system. Additionally, wearable communication
can be greatly improved by using a set of networking
technologies such as non-orthogonal multiple mobile edge
computing and energy harvesting techniques.
III. WBAN HEALTH MONITORING ENABLED BY A 5G
NETWORK.
5G is an emerging technology that has a major effect on the
lives of people in different sectors, although it has a lot of
benefits in the field of health care monitoring, it suffers from
various drawbacks. This section will introduce the benefits
and challenges of utilizing 5G technology in the WBAN
health care system. Also, the architecture of WBAN with a
5G wireless link is illustrated.
1. The benefits of using 5G wireless network in the field
of health monitoring.
Nowadays, health care suffers from various problems as
patients usually have to travel to a doctor or hospital for
medical care, however, patients in isolated region obliged to
travel for a long time because doctors existing very far
away, this long trip of those sick people will be dangerous
and time, cost-consuming. Through remote health care
systems, patients could gain nursing from their houses [4].
Doctors could give patients recommendations over a short
video call, and present recipe requests, besides this doctor or
patient can take another medical opinion, by sending the
patient’s image or report of the result of the tests to more
than one doctor and attain that doctor’s opinion of the
medical case. This assists doctors get access to much-
essential experience and helps the health care system to
defeat disparities based on income, location, or class status.
The transmission of medical images such as X-rays or CT
scans needs high-speed transmission to give both patients
and doctors the opportunity to gain second or third opinions
[1]. This remote monitoring with complicated imaging
instruments can cause more stress on the networks of the
medical system. This often rises crowding and decelerates
network speeds, particularly for healthcare suppliers that
might be contacting tens of patients a day. In addition to the
time lag, bad quality can delay patient care, which could
harm results in the long run. 5G technologies have the
ability to handle these defects and reduce overall medical
costs as it can keep the patients and the doctors always in
touch as it allows the doctors to take care of anybody around
the world without needs to travel physically [27]. The
capabilities of 5G technologies as reliability, low
latency …etc., achieve enormous improvement in the field
of remote health monitoring as it gives various
advantageous in the field of health care including
diagnostics, imaging, data analytics, and treatment. 5G will
serve a lot of health applications that need high bandwidth
and reliable connectivity such as mission-critical therapeutic
tasks that need high reliability and low latency, with
intervals down to little milliseconds [1]. Availing the super-
speed 5G network aid in transmitting massive data files of
medical images quickly and reliably, in addition, to allow
doctors to attain the continuous data which is needed to
make fast healthcare resolutions that can get better access to
care as well as the care quality. 5G facilities non-native
English patients understand their diagnosis and follow-up
doctor instructions using 5G, translators held a video
conference among ill persons and physicians utilizing
samples at the network edge with minimum latency.
Remote monitoring for a large number of patients can be
achieved through a 5G network which has the ability to
support more than 60,000 connections with the lowest
latency and highest capacity so it can provide remote
monitoring for more patients [27]. Doubtless, providers will
attain the needed medical data in real-time. Therefore, they
can present the care to several patients. 5G supports various
healthcare applications such as telemedicine, robotic
surgery, and AR/VR aided surgery [2].
Fig 1: Doctor on Demand sample
As shown in figure 1 telemedicine benefits like Doctor on
Demand which connect patients with doctors in various
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specialties operators completely across digital channels.
Rather than traveling to the doctor’s clinic, the doctor
attends to the patient’s screen. Telemedicine [28] needs a
network that can advocate continuous good-quality video.
Thanks to 5G, healthcare systems have the capability to
allow mobile networks to organize telemedicine meetings,
which make the telemedicine program more reachable.
Utilizing 5G technology by healthcare systems, sick persons
can usually gain proper treated quickly and has a connection
with specialists else not available. As well as physicians and
other staff members can efficiently collaborate in a more
efficient way.
Fig. 2: Robotic surgery
In robotic surgery [29], the surgeon did the surgery by
directing robotic surgical arms over a 5G network. The
delay time was considered to be only 0.1 seconds between
the control device of the surgeon and the robot in the
surgical room. This high speed can minimize the danger of
probably fatal medical faults. 5G also enhances AR/VR
aided surgery as it requires high-quality video, low delay,
3D images, and large image data.
2. Challenges of WBAN health care system enabled by a
5G network.
WBAN health care system composed of lightweight sensors
(in-body or on-body) in addition to an IoT device connected
to the medical server via 5G link [3]. Those lightweight
sensors detect vital signs of the human body and wirelessly
transmit this data to the IoT device which in turn transmits it
to the medical server through the 5G link. On the WBAN
side, the consumed energy of sensors is the main challenge
as the replacement of any sensor when it consumes its
energy can cause the patient great annoyance if the node is
on-body or tough pain if it is in- body. Moreover, the
extended number of various lightweight sensors can raise
the amount of data transmitted that can cause congestion on
the radio network [26]. To overcome this congestion, edge
cloud and edge computation can be proposed to enable the
local processing of the sensed data [30]. This shall reduce
the latency processing that seems to be essential for
emergency situations but in the meantime, it shall exhaust
the sensor energy. So, ways must be done to extend the
lifetime of WBAN sensors. On the server-side, the main
challenge is the coverage which is the most essential task for
long-range communication (5G) to connect patients and
doctors, with the medical server. Unfortunately, the
coverage of 5G may drop more often than on 4G networks.
This is because of the coverage radius of 5G cell towers was
smaller, so they can’t cover a wide zone with few cells [1].
Future research is underway to solve the coverage issue in
the 5G network. One another challenge is the management
of the huge amount of generated data from different
WBANs to ensure the consistency of patient data ling on
different IoT devices. In WBANs, the sensed data of the
patient is divided over different sensors and managed across
a set of Laptops or PCs connected to the medical server. If
the mobile of the doctor does not include all patient data, he
can’t diagnose the patient correctly. In addition to the
security of the patient’s health situation to protect a patient’s
data from unauthorized access [31]. Regrettably, security
and privacy problems are not completely resolved by the 5G
network. Also, the 5G link utilized for WBANs should
mitigate the interference in order to ensure the successful
data reception [32]. Some challenges that face WBAN
health care monitoring systems can be resolved using 5G
technology such as the quick and reliable delivery of a large
amount of medical data thanks to the high speed that is
guaranteed by 5G.
IV. IoT Based WBAN Healthcare architecture
over 5G wireless link
Fig. 3: WBAN architecture
The IoT based WBANs systems are generally characterized
by three tiers [3] as illustrated in figure 3. The first tier
composed of a group of wearable’s or implanted sensors
which used to sense vital data of human body like blood
pressure, heart rate…etc., the second tier is the CN
(coordinator), CN is located on a smartphone to
communicate with the body sensors via short-range
communication such as Bluetooth or ZigBee. CN also has a
role of being an interface between body sensors and the
dedicated medical server via long-range communication
such as 5G. CN communicates with the medical server to
transfer the medical services to the patients. The CN is
responsible for the processing of the sensed data from the
body sensor and also gives the highest priority to the critical
signals to be transmitted to the medical server. In addition
to its analysis role of the body sensor signals and matches
the patient’s health status depends on the data transmitted to
the medical server to supply feedback to the user via a
graphical interface. The hardware of the CN includes an
input unit, digital signal processor, transceiver, antenna,
GPS interface, charging circuit, display, battery and flash
memory. The third tier is the medical server. The sensor’s
sensed data are transmitted to the dedicated medical server
through the internet/intranet using the 5G link to check it.
The medical unit is alerted for emergency situations when
there is an abnormality in the patient data. The medical
server stores the sensed data in a database for future analysis
to deliver the health care service. As well as it is responsible
for the patient authentication.
V- MILLIMETRE-WAVE: MM-WAVE FOR 5G
COMMUNICATIONS.
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Several types of research have been proposed to prove the
workability of mm-Wave in WBANs, by studying its merits.
It has been investigated that 60 GHz mm-Wave is the best
suitable frequency bands for WBANs with comparison to
conventional 2.4 GHz due to its important features such as
the dense coverage of the network, lightweight devices,
better reuse of frequency, huge transmission rate up to
multi-gigabyte [36, 37, 38], it used for line of sight
communication as well as non-line of sight communication
which is essential to handle the mobility concern in WBANs
systems, also it has no serious long-range impact on the
health of WBAN user. The mm-Wave enhances the quality
of WBAN health care systems, as it actually reduces the
interference among multiple WBANs. The limited-range of
mm-Wave has a significant effect on enhancing the WBAN
security [39]. It is also found that the millimetre-wave can
be utilized in health care applications as acute pain
therapeutic.
1. Drawbacks of mm-Wave used in WBANs
communication.
Like any other technology, mm-Wave has some
disadvantages [33].
Mm-Wave is unlicensed; this will lead to a severe
problem for the coexistence of WBANs based on mm-Wave
with other networks. Furthermore, WBANs may overlap
with another WBAN in congested regions such as schools,
metro stations, cinemas, etc., because of their fast
movement, small network region, and huge density. This
overlapping causes enormous interference results between
existing WBANs. Such inter-network interferences can
result from the node-to sink, node-to-node or sink-to-sink as
shown in figure 4. However, in familiar networks, the
interference just results among a small number of nodes
while the interference to sink is actually infrequent.
Fig. 4: Interference between two WBAN and among other devices
Mm-Waves applied only to communicate on body
devices; it can’t be used for in-body devices.
Bounded range of millimetre waves because of the
short wavelength, causes a limited transmission range.
Additionally, these short wavelengths experience, huge
attenuation; due to natural phenomena that attenuate the
waves, and decreasing the transmission distance
2. The coexistence problem of mm-wave WBANs
communication.
Millimetre waves are commonly used for the wide
bandwidth, line of sight communication. It supports
various applications in different sectors such as HD video
applications, satellite communication, automotive
applications, scanners for the human body that used in
airports, in addition to medical applications; it can also be
used for imaging techniques [35]. The mm-Wave can be
used as an interference mitigation method for WBAN health
care systems. As mentioned above the coexistence of
multiple WBANs in congested places causes inter WBANs
interference. This interference among multiple WBANs can
be averted by turning into existing neighbouring channels.
However practically, in the most crowded regions, the
availability of channels is restricted and the WBANs have to
use mutual channels by decreasing the interference of inter-
WBAN network. Coexistence between WBANs and other
networks and among multiple WBANs has major
importance in remote monitoring systems. The millimetre
coexistence problem can be solved by applying a game
theory which is defined as the procedure of modelling the
communication between various players in a case consisting
of some rules and outcomes.
3. MM-wave frequency band for 5G mobile
communication
The mobile device of the WBAN system acts as an interface
between the WBAN and the medical server. It transmits the
data of the WBAN to the medical server via a 5G link which
communicates wirelessly at higher-frequency bands; these
new bands have important features. First, they make access
to digital services easier. Second, they will guarantee the
speedy travel of signals and provide shorter latency periods.
Third, support wide bandwidth, enormous data rates in
addition to the increase of the throughput and avoid
congestion. Forth they have the ability to connect a huge
number of mobile devices from multiple WBANs. All these
features shall enhance the quality of WBAN applications.
The most popular frequency bands that implement 5G
network is millimetre Wave spectrum (mm Wave) [33] and
microWave frequency bands (cmWave) [34] which have
been used in a lot of medical applications as it also used to
improve the quality of imaging technique that will aid in the
treatment of several diseases such as breast cancer [28].
VI. APPLICATION SCENARIOS
5G technologies will provide a large number of incoming
applications in different areas such as education,
entertainment, and healthcare. It will give the mobile more
important than it is now. Remote health care applications
have gained great attention in the last few years due to its
importance. Recently, several obstacles have been existing
which may prevent the implementation of such remote
health care systems. Thanks to 5G technologies, it can offer
new advantages such as enhanced security concerns, a
massive Base Station (BS), in addition to enormous device
densities. It will provide huge numbers of antennas as well
as very high bandwidth in the wireless link. Therefore, 5G
infrastructures can improve the remote patient’s tracking
and monitoring, with improvement in the transmission of
the data among patients and health care assistance [4].
Furthermore, Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) is an
important feature of 5G, which has a significant impact on
wireless network performance [40].
The BSs of MIMO are provided with an enormous amount
of antennas, maybe hundreds of antennas, in the meantime
connect a lot of end-users at equal frequency band. A large
number of antennas used in the transmitter and receiver side
create more possible paths of signals, this shall improve the
performance.
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These large numbers of antennas achieve a great
enhancement in throughput and efficient energy utilization.
These kinds of systems will achieve decreased latency, high
speed in transmitting data and capacity requirements which
are considered as key for 5G technologies and the internet of
things applications.
1. Emergency WBAN healthcare system based on 5G
technology and MCC
Recently, the emergency situation of the healthcare system
is not fully handled, especially, in the non - advanced
countries. Rapid deterioration can appear unexpectedly.
Time is the most critical issue for patients. More patients
have died because they couldn’t get the treatment at the
proper time. WBANs and mobile technologies presented
remote health monitoring and alert systems. The goal of
such systems is to provide continuous feedback about the
health status of the patients whereas alerting when detecting
emergency cases. Many mobile devices –have been used in
medical monitoring. However, the battery life and
processing capacity of the mobile device limit this medical
application. To overcome the limitation of computing on
mobile devices other techniques have been used such as
Mobile Cloud Computation (MCC). With 5g technology
and MCC [41], the healthcare system can provide diagnosis
and real-time monitoring of the patients, especially in
emergency cases. Moreover, depend on the MIMO
technique of 5G; there will be high device densities, huge
numbers of BSs and antennas. So, multiple BANS’ data can
be monitored and processed in real-time using massive
MIMO and cloud servers.
Now, an example of the emergency WBAN healthcare
system [42] will be explained as follows:
WBAN consists of wearable and implanted sensors (ECG,
blood pressure sensor, temperature sensor …etc.) that sense
vital data of the human body.
The emergency status can be generated from ECG and blood
pressure. The mobile device receives the body sensors’ data
wirelessly and transmits this vital data to the medical server
through a 5G wireless link. The medical server equipped
with a program that can automatically observe the
abnormalities in the measurements (Intelligent Diagnostic
Mechanism (IDM) and the cautions shall be transmitted to
the doctors for the fast response. In order to automatic
observe and compare the abnormal cases from a huge
amount of medical data, machine learning mechanisms have
been used [43], which train immense data so as to obtain an
efficient training performance [44]. Therefore, the machine
learning techniques cannot be applied efficiently in the
mobile device, because these techniques require high
computational complexity on data repetition training
processing. Therefore, alternative techniques have to be
offered because it can run these techniques in the mobile
device in an efficient manner. Using MCC the complicated
configuration like wider memory capacity or great-speed
central processing unit is not essential in mobile devices, as
it can be stored in the cloud. 5G infrastructure can integrate
multiple WBANs and MCC [37]. The smart devices act as
gateways for WBANs and connect to the medical servers via
a 5G link to deliver the healthcare missions to the cloud. As
soon as the cloud receives the demands from the smart
devices, the healthcare missions have been scheduled on a
Virtual Machine (VM), by the cloud controller and the
results are transmitted to smart devices. The framework of
the cloud service depends on robust VM resources so as to
fulfil many healthcare services as location-based services,
automatic diagnosis and IDM services [37]. The
differentiation of users from patients to doctors to hospitals,
require various cloud services by multiple interfaces like
PCs, mobile phones, and other mobile devices. The cloud
services are connected to the internet through an application
that serves as a firewall [45] to transfer the medical service.
The sick persons’ data stored in the cloud have to cross this
firewall. The main role of this firewall is to review the
authorization performers such as hospitals, doctors, etc.
Unauthorized access is denied. Another function of the
firewall is it gives the sensors the ability to locally store the
data for reprocessing as it simplifies this data before
transmitting it to the cloud. The cloud server stores the ID
of the sick-persons’ data for easily managing and analyzing
this data.
The most critical role of this system is to handle emergency
situations. As soon as ECG and blood pressure sensors
reveal a wide deviation from the normal readings; these
abnormal readings will be sent to the smartphone which in
turn sent it to the internet via a 5G connection.
In this abnormal case, the patients’ data are directly sent to
cloud service, and the authorization is not essential.
The IDM on the cloud analyzes and processes the data very
fast, and the warnings or alerts can be delivered to the
doctor or the hospital to take the proper action at a time such
as sending an ambulance to the patient. This requires from
the system the detection of patient location. Once the
accurate location is detected, the ambulance will be sent
from the closest hospital instantly and preparations will be
done by the physicians in the hospital. In a familiar
framework, GPS can be used to detect the patients’
locations. But, the fast growth of 5G technology and the
utilization of massive MIMO [40], other techniques are
developed to detect the patients’ localizations.
2. WBAN health care application depends on
5Gcontent-centric networking 5G-CCN.
In many WBAN applications, the e-health duties offered by
WBAN use the IP address to connect to the internet.
However, the IP network has specific disadvantages. Firstly,
IP network suffers from the loss of communication among
hosts. Moreover, when the host is moving, a fresh IP
address is needed to be registered. Secondly, the IP network
has a problem in security as it only secures the connection
among hosts [46].
In order to face these challenges, a Content-Centric Network
(CCN) has been proposed [47] which has a lot of benefits
such as adequate resource management, controlling traffic,
security, and scalability [48, 49].
To make use of the benefits of CCN, an IoT- dependent 5G-
CCN scheme for WBAN has been proposed.
This scheme of 5G-CCN [50] solves several problems in E-
health monitoring and illustrates the role of IoT device
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which makes it easier for chronic disease owners to coexist
with their disease. Also, this scheme can enhance security
by using the idea of a digital signature that is applied to
defend the confidentiality of patients’ medical information.
Additionally, in 5G-CCN scheme the direct access to the
hospital server is not essential to access the data of any
patient because each router in the network has caching
capability to store the patients’ contents. The integration
between 5G and CCN network for WBAN gives more
efficiency and faster, it has the capability to serve more
users with more devices. Also, it is the best solution to
handle emergency cases of any patient. If WBAN uses
smart devices connected by 5G then, it will have the
possibility to communicate millions of IoT devices [1].
Now, a practical example of e-health application and its
deficiency is explained [45]. If an old man suffers from a
chronic disease called diabetes, this old man uses an
implanted wireless iDentifiable device (iDiab) that
responsible for measuring and computing his blood sugar
level regularly. This device is a sensor of the WBAN system
that consists of various sensors that used to monitor the
health status of this old man by considering some important
parameters such as sugar level, breathing rate and the rate of
heartbeat. One day this old man eats a lot of sweets and
cake. After that, while he was sleeping, his blood sugar
begins rising and exceeds the safe level. The iDaib device
senses the raised level of blood sugar and immediately sends
an alert to his smartphone. The built-in IoT communicator in
the smartphone has the ability to connect to the internet via a
wireless interface. This smart-phone has an installed
message about the insulin injection within 30 minutes. This
tiny, smart device saves the life of this old man.
One other day, the breathing rate of this old man is
increasing continually and suffering from bleeding. The
sensor device recognized this emergency data and instantly
communicates with the server of the hospital for possible
help. Regrettably, there are no doctors in this hospital at that
time. As a result, this old man is about to die. In spite of
this, the sugar level of this old man is detected by IoT device
of the health-care system. But, the health status seems to be
dangerous if there’s no instant medical help. Therefore, the
5G-CCN application will be used to overcome these
problems. The architecture of this E-health application gives
continuous medical services. In this 5G-CCN application,
the IoT smart devices not only communicate with the server
of a dedicated hospital but also, they can make use of the
caching capabilities of routers of the closest hospitals to give
solutions and dealing with abnormal cases. To handle the
abnormal situations, it requires good reliability of the
service in order to prevent any person, like this old man
from facing such a critical case. In addition to achieving
limited latency so that the patient can attain health care
during a very short period. Finally, the authorization of
special and critical data must be ensured. Consequently,
suitable authentication should be granted in the sharing of
critical data.
Table 1 Features of WBAN applications powered by 5G
technology.
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