5G-A Builds a Dedicated Air Bridge for Smart Healthcare
BEIJING, Nov. 13, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- Currently, there are two pain points in the transportation of medical materials: slow response to urgent medical needs and unbalanced medical resource allocation.
According to statistics, three people in the world need a blood transfusion every second. In China, more than 6 million patients need blood transfusions every year. Limited by traffic conditions, traditional blood transportation usually takes a long period of time. Additionally, medical resources are unevenly distributed in urban and rural areas, making it difficult for patients from rural areas to seek medical treatments in urban hospitals, especially for those with mobility impairments. For example, residents in Hongtong Village in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province had to spend several hours on taking medical checks in the Second People's Hospital of Yuhang District.
To address this issue, A third-class hospital in Zhejiang cooperated with Hangzhou Antwork Network Technology Co., Ltd. to transport blood with UAVs. By carrying out numerous tests, verifications, and test flights, they have accumulated extensive experience and successfully established a channel in air for blood transportation. UAVs are flexible, fast, autonomous, and not affected by road conditions, demonstrating great significance in the field of medical emergencies. The success of the three parties marks the use of the first regular UAV route for emergent blood delivery in China. Currently, Hangzhou has established multiple blood delivery routes, creating the world's first city-level regular blood delivery system.
To further combine the flexible and efficient advantages of UAVs with medical services, China Telecom has proposed the world's first super air-ground convergence technology.
The world's first super air-ground convergence technology was released during MWC Shanghai 2024. This technology forms an efficient ground-to-air private network, achieving continuous coverage at low altitudes.
In addition, sensing application services (AS), sensing functions (SF), and base station sensing devices form a high-precision medical sensing network. The network supports functions such as complex UAV trajectory analysis, geo-fence, and multi-object detection at the precision within one meter, escorting medical channels in air in real time.
Using these innovative technologies and devices, the low-altitude network features high bandwidth and low latency and meets the 4K HD video backhaul requirements of UAVs. Medical resource delivery with UAVs is fast, flexible, and will not be affected by ground traffic conditions or weather conditions (scale-5 wind resistance). The transportation efficiency is improved by 60%, ensuring 24-hour instant response to urgent blood requests. The actual flight data indicates that the blood volume delivered per flight can meet the emergency use of one or two patients, while the transportation time per flight is just half of ground transportation under the same conditions, ensuring both "emergency blood use" and "planned blood replenishment."
These technologies have also established more UAV highways from towns to towns, building a bridge between the central hospital of the medical consortium and the grassroots healthcare centers, and providing great support for the implementation of the hierarchical diagnosis and treatment system. For example, a patient can leave a blood sample in a community hospital, which will be delivered to the detection center through the UAV. In dozens of minutes, the detection result will be available. This greatly improves the efficiency of medical treatments for the public.
According to Antwork, its UAV logistics scheduling system has been fully integrated with the smart medical platform of several large third-class hospitals in Zhejiang. This integration not only forms a closed service loop, but also provides technical assurance for blood transportation, making it one of the most advanced medical practices with UAVs in the world.
The cooperation between China Telecom, Antwork, and the hospital is a historic milestone, as it signifies the recognition of UAV technology in clinical healthcare. The dedicated UAV route will provide more assurance for emergency rescue and save more patients' lives. Delivering medical resources with UAVs is gaining recognition in the healthcare industry.
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