# 6G to Take the Digital Divide by Storm: Key Technologies and Trends to Bridge the Gap
## 6 The 6G Services to \"Connect\" People
### The eHealth Case  
6G will mark a turning point in the digitization process of the healthcare sector and the application of new paradigms can help in achieving a _fully digital and connected world_[35]. This represents an important step forward in overcoming the problem of the digital divide. Thanks to the provision of telemedicine services, the physical barriers of separation between patients and health professionals can be surpassed and the delivery of health services can be  
\begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{p{142.3 pt} p{142.3 pt}} \hline \hline
**6G Technology** & **AI Candidates** \\ \hline Sensor Networks and Edge Systems & Reinforcement Learning, Unimodal \& Multi-modal Classification, Autoregressive Models \\ \hline SDN \& D2D & (Deep) Reinforcement Learning, Multimodal Classification, Deep Neural Networks \\ \hline Drone Swarms & Reinforcement Learning, Unsupervised Learning, Agent-based models \\ \hline Extended Reality & Computer Vision, Autoregressive models \\ \hline Brain-Computer Interfaces & Recurrent Neural Networks, Autoregressive Models, Continual Learning \\ \hline Affective Computing & Convolutional Neural Networks, Multimodal Classification, Natural Language Processing \\ \hline \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table}
Table 2: AI candidates for the 6G technologies.  
remotely guaranteed to many people, wherever they are whatever their condition. Indeed, to integrate telemedicine into the health systems of the different countries of the world, training courses should be taught to medical personnel and inclusive solutions should be designed to allow access to digital services even for people culturally far away from the technological world.  
Figure 3 depicts the eHealth scenario consisting of the caring @home of a patient residing in a rural/critical area. Internet access to the patient premises may be provided by means of either spaceborne or airborne vehicles to enable its health monitoring by means of Medical Things (IoMT) devices, possibly exploiting D2D communications among them to extend indoor coverage. Due to the likely impossibility/inability of the patient to interact with the eHealth devices, AI and BCI can come to the rescue for contriving the fittest remedies. For example, IoMT devices that can obey voice commands and execute precise instructions can be delivered to the patients to allow them to remotely manage simple monitoring operations of health parameters. Furthermore, MEC servers can be installed close to the IoMT devices clusters (i.e., on the UAVs) to lighten their workload through computation offloading and reduce the data-gathering delay.  
Remote monitoring and assistance of patients are just some of the eHealth services that can be efficiently managed thanks to mobile wireless networks and that could benefit a lot from the advantages offered by 6G technologies. For example, specialist teleconsultation between doctors operating in different parts of the world is a very important application that would allow to break down the geographical boundaries of knowledge, making the experience and skills of medical luminaries available everywhere. Remote surgery, which can be defined as the telehealthcare service thanks to which a doctor can perform surgery at long distances from the patient [36], is an example of an application that asks for stringent requirements in terms of latency, security, and reliability in order to be widely diffused and that, therefore, would greatly enjoy the support of future 6G networks. A different use of technology in support of healthcare is shown in [37], where the benefits of applying VR for motor rehabilitation are deeply described. There are also numerous research proposals that introduce the use of potentially key technologies of 6G for eHealth services related to COVID-19, such as [38; 39; 40].