ICU On Wheels: Inside India's First 5G-Enabled Ambulance

Monitoring patients in realtime from a remote location, video call facility with speedy internet connection, plus more is available with the launch of India's first Fifth-Generation or 5G network-enabled ambulance on Saturday.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched 5G services in today at India Mobile Congress in Delhi. The 5G services started with India's No.2 operator Bharti Airtel rolling out services in eight cities, including Delhi, Mumbai, Varanasi and Bengaluru.

Reliance Jio, the country's top operator with most subscribers, is to launch its services in four metros sometime this month, while Vodafone Idea Ltd, the third operator, has so far not indicated any fixed timeline for its 5G rollout.

"Whole point of a connected ambulance is not a new thing. The fundamental difference is that what goes inside the ambulance is now enhanced. So earlier you could not put in a defibrillator (a machine that uses an electric current to make someone's heart beat), you couldn't put a patient monitoring system. At the most you could set up a WhatsApp call and the doctor could take a look at the patient with a mobile video. All that has changed," Shankar Srinivasan from Cisco Systems told NDTV.

"With 5G you could load the whole ambulance with medical equipment, be it injection syringe, pump or ECG machine or a ventilator and so on. And they are all connected so that the remote doctor can administer the patient in realtime and give the right kind of treatment. The ability to send patient's data in realtime at a very fast pace with least latency. That's the fundamental difference between any kind of connected ambulances vs 5G connected ambulance," Mr Srinivasan explained further.

Asked if the cost will be a big factor, Mr Srinivasan said it's a cost vs life question and that the cost can be managed as it will benefit more people.

"There is a cost element. But then it's a cost vs life question. It's a very hard tradeoff. We have designed it as a whole ICU on Wheels. You could despatch it to remote district headquarters or a tier 3 village or town. And you could have a whole bunch of people doing their medical check-up on a frequent basis, so you can actualise that cost over a larger number of people. Not just carrying a person from one part of the city to another part of the city. So cost is something that is manageable," he said.  

Besides powering ultra-low latency connections, which allow downloading full-length high-quality video or movie to a mobile device in a matter of seconds (even in crowded areas), 5G can enable solutions such as e-health, connected vehicles, more-immersive augmented reality and metaverse experiences, life-saving use cases, and advanced mobile cloud gaming, among others.