Fraunhofer Representative Office Beijing
5G in the OR: Advances in Technology Unlock Opportunities for Hospitals

© Fraunhofer IPA

How can surgery be made more cost-effective, safer and more efficient in the future? An interdisciplinary French-German team has developed high-tech hybrid operating rooms that harness the power of 5G and AI to unlock whole new applications.
A medical emergency requires complicated surgery. But the closest specialist is hundreds of kilometers away. These days, this kind of situation could be a life-or-death issue, but just a few short years from now, surgeons might be able to operate on patients remotely, with support from a robot with haptic feedback. The hospital would operate its own 5G network, ensuring low-latency connections to exchange data continuously during the operation. Researchers worked on these and other scenarios in the 5G-OR (Establishing the next generation of a 5G-enabled operating room ecosystem to improve patient outcome) project, which has just concluded.

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