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Challenges for a data-driven society
overall operational-cost, in the emerging “green networked to be processed and transmitted from one room or a
Hospital”, in favor of the people in need. building to another, for various purposes.
Data transmission should be usually broadband, since high
2.8. Toward “smart green Hospitals” resolution medical images and other monitoring information
can easily produce a constant and large volume of data.
Concerning the Health and Medical systems, in a Hospital Traditional wired networks can only provide limited
network access to certain fixed medical devices [17].
or in a Medical center, monitoring and diagnosis data need
Figure 1. An overview of the wireless world toward the 5G of wireless/mobile broadband [8]. 5G on the Horizon
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/300484775_Leveraging_SDN_for_the_5G_Networks/figures?lo=1
WiFi-based networks must rely on the existence of Ethernet Global system for mobile communications (GSM), general
connections, which may cause high system cost and packet radio service (GPRS), enhanced data rates for GSM
complexity, without, however, the ability to eliminate dead evolution (EDGE), universal mobile telecommunications
spots. However, these issues do not exist in WMNs. system (UMTS), high-speed packet access (HSPA) etc.
Certainly, the 5G technology and the Internet of Things will contribute, not without drawbacks, to the gradual maturity
upgrade Health-care services, both, in Hospital and in of a “global technical smart and green alliance”.
Home-care. The IoT i.e. the inter-networking of physical ICTs have already formed an extended, complicated and
devices, vehicles, buildings, and other entities, embedded global “ecosystem”. Green-computing offers the most
with electronics, software, sensors, actuators, and network convincing strategical alternative to slow-down the climatic
connectivity which enable these objects to collect and change and to adequately reverse the global environmental
exchange data[18]-[20]. degradation.
In 2013 the Global Standards Initiative on Internet of Health-care and its “Temple”, the modern Hospital, forms,
Things (IoT-GSI) defined the IoT as "a global infrastructure another very important “ecosystem”. Technology interacts
for the information society, enabling advanced services by with Medicine for Centuries and this interface leads
interconnecting physical and virtual “things”, based on gradually to an approach between these two “ecosystems”,
existing and evolving interoperable information and especially after the invention of CT (Nobel Prize Medicine
communication technologies"[20]. 1979, A. M. Cormack and G. N. Hounsfield) and the entry
The emerging 5G wireless-world incorporates gradually the of Medicine in the “digital world”. The emerging “green
existing technologies and follows several technical smart Hospital” of the near future, originates eventually
directions, aiming to the provision of cost-efficient from this successful “marriage”.
resources, for an augmented collective intelligence, of the
emerging wireless world.
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