DIGITAL HEALTH
“ In Africa , we see ourselves as a very important part of society , with responsibility that goes beyond telecommunications services ”
ERIK BRENNEIS IOT DIRECTOR AT VODAFONE , VODAFONE
The future for IoT in healthcare Brenneis believes many of these IoT solutions will become mainstream in the near future as barriers to adoption are overcome . Historically one of the main challenges has been cost . However , one of the long-term benefits is making cost savings . IoT removes the need to send maintenance engineers out to repair devices and reduces unnecessary trips to the doctor .
Another barrier has been the complexity of implementing IoT . " Medical equipment companies are not communication experts ", Brenneis explains . " From a hardware point of view , they didn ' t know what kind of device to put into a medical machine for it to communicate . So we found a way to help our customers by saying that if they used Vodafone connectivity in their medical devices , we would provide the telecommunications and the engineer to help them develop their solution together ."
Embedding communications and healthcare will be a part of how healthcare providers digitise in the future . Brenneis explains that in Germany , they are already building 5G networks directly within hospitals . " These 5G networks are different from a wifi network which is usually the standard in a hospital nowadays , but also different from a 4G network in that there is immediate response time when you send a message from one place to another , within one millisecond . In comparison , the response time of a 4G network is 30 milliseconds , which is more than human reaction time .
" This is enabling very innovative remote surgery applications , where an expert surgeon can be somewhere with a virtual reality headset on and can be in the emergency room with others , telling them exactly what to do . They are all connected through an ultra-safe 5G system where there ' s no possibility of the connection dropping because you can reserve a certain bandwidth for exactly this kind of application . That ' s really exciting ."
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