Tactile-Internet-Based Telesurgery System for Healthcare 4.0: An Architecture, Research Challenges, and Future Directions

Telesurgery in the 5G era has huge potential to deliver healthcare surgical services to remote locations using high-speed data transfer with a wireless communication channel. It provides benefits to society in view of its improved precision and accuracy to diagnose patients even from remote locations. However, the existing traditional telesurgery system has high communication latency and overhead, which limits its applicability in a wide range of future applications. To mitigate these issues, in this article, we analyze and give insights on the 5G-enabled Tactile Internet (TI)-based telesurgery system for Healthcare 4.0. The URLCC service of 5G ensures ultra-low latency (< 1 ms) and ultra-high reliability (99.999 percent) communication channel for remote surgery. We propose an architecture for telesurgery with two different aspects of communication channel: traditional network and 5G-enabled TI. Then we present a recent case study on the world's first successfully executed teleslanting heart surgery. The analysis shows that the proposed architecture with TI as a network backbone has faster response time and higher reliability in comparison to the existing system. Finally, some key open issues and research challenges of the traditional telesurgery architecture in terms of latency and reliability are highlighted.