Expanding the Reach of Health Care in Developing Nations with WiMAX

I am sharing a paper I came across at Cisco mobility community site. This site, sponsored by Cisco, aims to provide a venue for education and to encourage conversations about mobile technologies such as 4G, WiMAX etc and related business, policy and social aspects. Anyone can join the site and participate.

The paper is titled “Expanding the Reach of Health Care in Developing Nations with WiMAX.” Here’s the direct link to the pdf. It talks about various case studies of using WiMAX connectivity to expand and improve health care in developing nations. However there are no details about the costs and the infrastructure hurdles which are so critical to WiMAX.

The paper mentions a project in Pakistan.

In Pakistan, Cisco is working on a trial that combines satellite and WiMAX connectivity to mobile units that provide earlier oncological screening to rural patients. Female patients feel more comfortable seeking care in a familiar environment, close to their homes. Earlier screening allows doctors to detect breast cancer in women when it is still treatable.

As illustrated below, WiMAX may initially be used mainly as a backhaul technology to provide basic data and voice connectivity to clinics. At a later stage, mobile applications will take on a larger role as network coverage, low cost devices, and mobile telemedicine applications become available.

The paper lists the key benefits WiMAX brings to telemedicine as:

• True broadband connectivity (2–4 Mbps in the downlink, 0.5–1.5 Mbps in the uplink) to enable transfer of large data files and video applications. In cellular networks, uplink speeds are typically substantially lower, slowing down transmission from the mobile workers back to the hospital. WiMAX performance is achieved by using a new wireless interface with high spectral efficiency, and by using wider channels that can increase the overall network capacity.
• IP based technology, which brings lower complexity and costs in managing the network, facilitates the development of new applications or the adaptation of existing applications, and can be easily integrated within existing networks.
• Carrier grade reliability and security, due to the use of licensed spectrum and IP core network technology. WiMAX supports multiple Extensible Authentication Protocol (EAP) methods, Remote Authentication Dial In User Service (RADIUS), Diameter, Advanced Encryption System (AES), and Privacy Key Management Protocol Version 2 (PKM v2). Security is crucial to ensure protection of patient and epidemiological data.
• Quality of Service (QoS) and traffic prioritization mechanisms, to give priority to latency sensitive applications such as voice and video. This increases the robustness of numerous telemedicine applications that rely on voice and video traffic.
• Lower cost?per?bit than cellular networks. This makes the technology affordable for network operators to deploy and for health care providers to use for telemedicine applications.
• A wide range of devices with WiMAX chipsets embedded along with WiFi, at a very low additional cost. This gives health providers greater flexibility in choosing the best?suited devices that are within their budget.