Remote healthcare includes a wide range of services that allows remote medical professionals to diagnose, treat and cure a patient, if for some reason they are unable to visit a local surgery or hospital. It can range from a telemedicine consulting service with a nurse or doctor, to telesurgery which is a surgeon controlling a remotely managed robotic surgeon from some distant location.
What is Telemedicine?
Telemedicine is defined as the remote diagnostics of a patient via a remote doctor or physician, using both video and audio technology. Instead of visiting a doctor's office or hospital in person, with telemedicine, you can discuss symptoms, medical issues, and experiences with a healthcare provider in real time using video.
What is Telesurgery?
Telesurgery is defined as the capability to fulfil remote surgery where a surgeon is performing the operation but from another distant location. This is normally achieved using a remotely managed robot.
The Technology Behind Telemedicine & Telesurgery
When interacting with patients remotely, especially during a surgical procedure, it is imperative that there is almost zero delay between what the surgeon can see, and what a robotic surgeon needs to do. If the surgeon cuts too deep as the delay was too long on the video stream, it can be catastrophic. The surgeon needs to view a live video stream in real time to react to any unexpected situation that might occur doing surgery.
The other issue is that many of these patients are in remote areas where the only form of internet connectivity is via a cellular network. A single cellular network connection could prove unreliable and not provide enough bandwidth for video for such procedures. This includes audio, signals for monitoring the vital signs, and for any return control signals that are used for robotic control or other machine controls.
The Zao technology from Soliton is designed to solve the issues of reliable connectivity for video and other control signals needed for telesurgery and telemedicine. It can bond together multiple cellular operators as a single highly reliable connection on a single mobile device. It optimizes video and other IP related control signals based on the available bandwidth, even if the cellular signal becomes low and unreliable. But most defining of this technology, is that the Zao X technology has a video latency of less than 100ms over multiple 4G connections. This is from camera to monitor and includes all encoding and decoding that is required of a video live stream. With 5G this delay could be reduced even further.
As well as ultra-low latency and support for 5G, the Zao-X can support high resolution video such as 4K/UHD which can be considered a pre-requisite for surgical operations.
Remote Diagnosis – Telemedicine
Overview
Connecting doctor in urban hospitals with patients in regional clinics
Problems
In order to effectively provide specialized medical care to patients in the community, high-quality images of patients are needed in real time
4K resolution is required, but low delay and stable video transmission can be difficult
Solution
Zao-X + 5G provide ultra short-delay, high-quality 4K video.
Image recognition server located on MEC (Multi-access edge computing (MEC)) can also be used
Remote Operation Surgery Assistant Robot
Overview
Remotely operate Surgery Assistant Robot via bonded 4G/5G/leased line
Problems
Highly reliable and ultra-low latency video and haptic feedback transmission are required for remote surgery operation
Solution
Zao-X provide Ultra low latency video and control signal transmission
Support network redundancy
If you wish to learn more about the potential of utilizing the Zao live streaming technology within your Tele-medicine or tele-surgery set-up, then please contact us now.
