Hyperconnected Health: How 6G Innovations Can Contribute to the Future of Healthcare
Wednesday, 4 June 2025, 16:00 – 17:30, room 0.B
Session Chair:
- Christoph Lipps (German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), DE)
- Thomas Neumuth (Innovation Center Computer Assisted Surgery (ICCAS), DE)
The healthcare sector is facing major challenges, and not just since the global COVID-19 pandemic. The combination of an ageing (and thus multimorbid) society, alongside with rising costs for care, materials and staff, as well as the shortage of skilled labor, is creating a need for action and solution-oriented approaches. Thereby, these issues impact the quality and efficiency of healthcare services.One attempt to address these issues is emerging as part of the development of 6G wireless technology, along with the recent advances offered by artificial intelligence methods. Combined, they offer transformative solutions for healthcare by addressing several key challenges: 6G’s ultra-fast connectivity can seamlessly integrate data from multiple sources, such as wearable devices, medical sensors and electronic health records, while AI can assist in analyzing the aggregated data to provide comprehensive insights into patient health, enabling earlier diagnoses and personalized treatment plans.The low latency of 6G will enable AI-driven systems to monitor patients in real time, even from remote locations. This is particularly beneficial for managing chronic conditions and providing continuous care, reducing the need for frequent hospital visits. Furthermore, AI and 6G enable the development of sophisticated medical robots, such as AI-driven exoskeletons for rehabilitation. These robots can provide personalized physical assistance and improve mobility, promoting faster recovery.Furthermore, AI methods can leverage the large amounts of data transmitted over 6G to predict health trends and potential disease outbreaks, enabling proactive measures and better resource allocation. In addition, AI can help detect and mitigate security threats in real time, ensuring the security of patient data. The advanced encryption protocols of 6G further enhance data protection. By combining the capabilities of AI and 6G, the healthcare sector can overcome existing inefficiencies and provide more effective, personalized and secure healthcare services.This session aims to highlight the opportunities created by innovation, digitalization, 6G and artificial intelligence to transform healthcare. At the same time, it will emphasize the need for appropriate regulation to ensure patient safety and protection. By combining technological advances and regulatory diligence, we can design a sustainable and efficient healthcare system for the future.
Program:
16:00 – 16:20: Motivation/Lightning Talk
16:20 – 16:35: Talk by Prof. Dr. med. Sascha Treskatsch, Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin
Title of the talk:
Monitoring of the future – The role of 6G in improving patient care
Systems medicine is the new frontier in medicine. The ability to fully understand the dynamic multiple pathways involved in maintaining physiological homeostasis requires an overwhelming amount of cognitive processing power. In modern medicine vast sums of bio-signal data from multiple physiological systems are continuously recorded from each patient especially when undergoing surgery. To further predict upcoming events and yield optimized (preventive) therapy decisions for each individual patient, physicians should further link the continuous data to available background information regarding multiple systemic levels like demographic data, laboratory data, imaging data and individual predispositions.However, today’s wired monitoring of patients’ health parameters is reaching its limits in many areas, which can lead to avoidable perioperative complications. To augment patient care, novel sensors, algorithms, and decision support systems to enable precision perioperative care for the future generations are required.These challenges are to be addressed in the 6G-Health project through the development of intelligent sensor technology, including wireless and virtually latency-free transmission of measurements and mobile communication systems. The aim is not only to make existing technologies wireless, but also to add new diagnostic methods based on artificial intelligence. To increase the efficiency of the sensor technology, methods of data pre-processing at the sensor and intelligent network orchestration must be included.
16:35 – 16:50: Talk by Dr.-Ing. Johannes Dommel, Fraunhofer Institute for Telecommunications, Heinrich-Hertz-Institut (HHI)
Title of the talk:
From Sensor to Decision: Enabling Smart Healthcare with 6G Technologies
The 6G-Health project aims to research and develop key technological components for 6G enabled connected medical systems. A central objective is the holistic advancement of 6G communication technologies as a foundation for future proof medical solutions, both within hospitals and in broader healthcare settings. 6G-Health drives innovation in healthcare by closely aligning technological development with concrete clinical needs. This includes, for example, the integration of innovative and noninvasive sensor technologies for advanced use cases in perioperative and tele-medical scenarios. These enable remote monitoring through a combination of novel sensing methods and enhanced network intelligence, such as distributed computing. The project also investigates application driven networking of medical devices, including sensors and diagnostic tools, aiming to unlock extended functionalities that support collaborative decision making using technologies such as augmented reality and edge level data preprocessing. Furthermore, 6G-Health envisions the deployment of enabling infrastructure in smart hospitals, allowing for a wide range of new services in diagnostics, treatment, quality management, and logistics through orchestration and data aggregation within clinical environments. Close collaboration with clinical partners ensures practical relevance, while early identification of 6G specific use cases in healthcare helps inform and shape emerging standards. A key technological approach is semantic aware communication, in which only clinically relevant, context aware, or task related information is extracted for transmission. This strategy reduces latency and bandwidth requirements, enabling more efficient and responsive systems tailored to the needs of modern healthcare. This talk provides an overview of the 6G-Health project, presenting key concepts, initial results, and illustrative application scenarios.
16:50 – 17:05: Talk by Dipl.-Ing. Hans Wenner, VDE Association for Electrical, Electronical & Information Technolgies
Title of the talk:
Compliant Integration of a Hybrid Medical System Consisting of Certified Medical Devices and General IT Components: The MD Comp Framework
The integration of Information (IT) and Operative Technology (OT) components into medical systems -including medical devices-, pose significant technical but above all regula- tory challenges, particularly in terms of safety and compliance. Therefore, this work offers a conceptual model for the systematic pre-qualification of non-medical components intended for use in medical systems: The MD Comp Framework. Based on established standards in the medical sector (such as IEC 60601-1, ISO 14971 and IEC 62304), the framework enables a ”compliance by design” strategy allowing essential regulatory requirements to be met without classifying the IT/OT components themselves as medical devices. This approach significantly reduces the complexity of risk assessment during network integration (e.g. the combination of IT/OT equipment and medical devices), including cybersecurity and interoperability. Furthermore, it is supporting the secure integration of emerging technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Beyond 5G/6G wireless systems into regulated healthcare environments. The MD Comp Framework provides a viable way to reconcile innovation and regulatory compliance, and is recommended for adoption in European guidance documents such as those issued by the Medical Device Coordination Group (MDCG) in the medium term.
17:05 – 17:20: Talk by Dipl. Phys. Jan Herbst, VGerman Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI)
Title of the talk:
From Body to Cloud: WBAN-Based Medical IoT as the Foundation for 6G Hyperconnectivity
Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) consist of tiny, self-organizing sensor nodes positioned on or inside the human body to enable continuous, real-time monitoring of vital signs. As the cornerstone of on-body medical IoT, WBANs meet stringent latency and power constraints and support early anomaly detection and remote patient management. However, the fragmented protocol landscape, interoperability of heterogeneous devices, dynamic propagation on the body and stringent data security and regulatory compliance requirements remain a major challenge. New approaches, such as cross-layer protocol architectures, low-power hardware and AI-driven sensor fusion, optimize resource utilisation and improve data reliability. Integrating WBANs into converged wireless systems, including next-generation 6G infrastructures, is critical to enable truly hyper-connected, personalised healthcare while ensuring system robustness and compliance. Future research directions include adaptive cross-layer scheduling, secure token management, and the incorporation of time-critical networking principles to achieve end-to-end QoS in next-generation healthcare systems.
