A 5G-Based eHealth Monitoring and Emergency Response System: Experience and Lessons Learned

5G is being deployed in major cities across the globe. Although the benefits brought by the new 5G air interface will be numerous, 5G is more than just an evolution of radio technology. New concepts, such as the application of network softwarization and programmability paradigms to the overall network design, the reduced latency promised by edge computing, or the concept of network slicing – just to cite some of them – will open the door to new vertical-specific services, even capable of saving more lives. This article discusses the implementation and validation of an eHealth service specially tailored for the Emergency Services of the Madrid Municipality. This new vertical application makes use of the novel characteristics of 5G, enabling dynamic instantiation of services at the edge, a federation of domains and execution of real on-the-field augmented reality. The article provides an explanation of the design of the use case and its real-life implementation and demonstration in collaboration with the Madrid emergency response team. The major outcome of this work is a real-life proof-of-concept of this system, which can reduce the time required to respond to an emergency in minutes and perform more efficient triage, increasing the chances of saving lives.