# How 5G Wireless (and Concomitant Technologies) Will Revolutionize Healthcare?
## 4 5G and Healthcare Opportunities  
5G is not just the new generation of 3G and 4G technologies, but it will create a new era of agile and turbo-charged connectivity with great performance and applications tailored precisely according to the different needs of users and the economy. Some prominent use cases along with related examples of 5G are shown in Figure 5.  
It is anticipated that 5G will achieve one thousand-times improvement in throughput with close to zero latency as compared to previous generations. The goals envisioned for 5G are shown in Figure 6. The latency of 5G is expected to be just a single millisecond, that is 50-times faster than 4G. The new paradigm of 5G will also bring various innovative health services with URLLC. As a result, patient care will be improved with low physician workloads and reduced costs. The \"Tactile Internet\" [43] will enhance current transmission capabilities of touch and skills. This ultra-responsive network will enable remote physical experiences for the surgeon to provide an accurate medical diagnosis and surgery. The extended transmission of multi-sensorial data including robotic touch (i.e., haptic feedback) will improve the overall experience of real-time remote interaction and consultation. Further, virtual and augmented reality will provide an immersive user experience and can be used for virtual reality exposure therapy. These distinctive features of 5G are the driving force in the future of medicine. This will change the trends in healthcare from reactive care to proactive care by providing the following missing pieces in the previous mobile communication network.  
Figure 5: 5G use cases and related examples. Adapted from: [42].  
5G will integrate various technologies in addition to those already employed by Long-Term Evolution (LTE) and will also utilize higher frequency bands to provide enhanced mobile broadband to address human-centric use cases. Some novel applications that will be enabled by 5G include ultra-reliable-low latency communications and massive machine-type communications for a huge number of connected devices [44]. In 5G architecture, new features--such as OFDMA (Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access), MIMO (Multiple Input-Multiple Output), carrier aggregation, Filtered OFDM (F-OFDM), Multi-User Multiple-Input Multiple Output (MU MIMO) and Sparse Code Multiple Access (SCMA)--will allow one to utilize the existing spectrum more effectively and increase user throughput rates and coverage. Self-Organizing Networks (SON) [45] will likely play a key role in the radio access portion. The 5G architecture will also incorporate Network Function Virtualization (NFV), network slicing and Software-Defined Networking (SDN) to create intelligence automation that will enable quick network scalability.  
5G will deliver sufficient rates to the end consumer and pave the way for a fully-connected and mobile society with various promising healthcare applications (as already being conceived by various industry players [46] and the standardization organization 5 GPP [47]). In what follows, we highlight some open research issues and future research directions for 5G-enabled healthcare.