Managing Physical Distancing Through 5G and Accelerated Edge Cloud

Specific 5G Release 17 work items are dealing with critical medical applications. Moreover, the adoption of mobile health (m-health) and e-health has been accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper first examines the requirements of critical medical applications that 5G is expected to support. Then it illustrates possible data protection, management, and privacy issues. Finally, it shows a first implementation of an m-health framework supporting physical distance management. Experimental results show that, by exploiting 5G connectivity and the computing capacity provided by an accelerated edge cloud, the proposed framework can detect physical distance violations faster than a user equipment (UE)-based implementation, while saving UE energy.

A Framework to Support Social Distancing Management based on 5G and Accelerated Edge Cloud

In 5G Release 17 specific work items are dealing with medical applications. Moreover, the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the adoption of mobile-health (m-health) and e-health. This paper proposes the implementation of a m-health framework supporting social distancing management. Experimental results show that by exploiting 5G connectivity and the computational power provided by an accelerated edge cloud, the proposed framework can perform social distancing verification faster than a user equipment (UE)-based deployment. © 2021 IEEE.