The internet of skills: is 5G changing surgery forever?

Imagine the year 2055: a Parkinson patient is receiving brain surgery by a surgical robot. The patient is in urgent need for a deep brain stimulation implant. As the procedure requires a highly specialized surgeon who is currently not close to the patient, the surgery is conducted by a surgeon sitting in another hospital thousands of kilometres away. This sounds crazy for us today. But now imagine that this remote surgery on a human Parkinson patient took place in the year 2019.

In March 2019 Ling Zhipei, chief of PLA General Hospital collaborated with China Mobile and Huawei to successfully conduct the implantation of a deep brain stimulation device into a Parkinson patient’s brain (Loeffler, 2019). The surgeon (located in Hainan hospital) used Huawei’s ultra-fast 5G network to control a surgical robot more than 3000 kilometres away in Beijing’s PLA General Hospital that executed the surgeon’s movements in real-time (Loeffler, 2019).

Key to the emergence of remote robotic surgery is one of 5G’s most groundbreaking attributes: the incredibly low latency of data transmission. Latency in computing is “the delay before a transfer of data begins following an instruction for its transfer” (Lexico, 2019). Latency essentially describes how long it takes for a network to transfer data and is therefore essential in environments such as autonomous driving or remote robotic surgery in which transmission speed is crucial. The new 5G network standard reduces end-to-end latency by 10 times compared to contemporary networks (Qualcomm, 2019). Thus, 5G’s low latency enables surgeons (and potentially other skilled people) to transmit their tacit skills with almost no latency to the other end of the world. Dohler et al. (2017) call this paradigm shift “the internet of skills” or “human 4.0” and suggest that “the internet of skills” will democratize labour in a similar way the internet democratized knowledge.

So, what does this all mean for robotic surgery? Dohler et al. (2017) describe important disaster operation applications for people in urgent need of specialist surgeons as one example of how 5G can be used to provide better healthcare. This would most likely create a global competition for skilled surgeons all around the world as tacit skills will compete globally. It could potentially be possible that your surgery at Erasmus MC in Rotterdam will be supervised or led by a specialist surgeon from Boston or the other way around. Ultimately it could also mean that hospitals in high-income countries will make use of cheaper labour from lower-income countries.

How do you think the internet of skills will revolutionize industries around the world?

Bibliography:

Dohler, M. et al. (2017) ‘Internet of skills, where robotics meets AI, 5G and the Tactile Internet’, in EuCNC 2017 – European Conference on Networks and Communications. doi: 10.1109/EuCNC.2017.7980645.
Lexico (2019). Latency | Definition of Latency by Lexico. [online] Lexico Dictionaries | English. Available at: https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/latency [Accessed 1 Oct. 2019].
Loeffler, J. (2019). China Performs Country’s First-Ever 5G Remote Brain Surgery. [online] Interestingengineering.com. Available at: https://interestingengineering.com/china-performs-countrys-first-ever-5g-remote-brain-surgery [Accessed 1 Oct. 2019].
Qualcomm (2019). How 5G low latency improves your mobile experiences. [online] Qualcomm. Available at: https://www.qualcomm.com/news/onq/2019/05/13/how-5g-low-latency-improves-your-mobile-experiences [Accessed 1 Oct. 2019].