5G4PHealth: Enhanced 5G-Powered Platform for Predictive Preventive Personalized and Participatory Healthcare

Musculoskeletal (MSK) conditions affect many people, including problems in joints, bones and muscles and sometimes associated tissues such as nerves. Over 20 million people in the UK, almost 30% of the population, have an MSK condition such as arthritis or back pain. Symptoms can include pain, stiffness, limited movement, and disability, which affect independence and quality of life. There is a significant impact on people and employers, and over 30 million working days are lost due to MSK conditions every year in the UK, and they account for up to 30% of GP consultations in England. MSK conditions account for the third-largest area of NHS spend, about £5 billion each year [\[1\]][0]. By 2030, over 15.3 million people in the UK will be over 65 years of age, resulting in an ever-increasing demand for MSK services. However, in the current rehabilitation process, there are persistent challenges for both patients and healthcare providers in terms of gathering necessary therapy information and reducing the risk of the rehabilitation process. Hence, there is a strong need for an effective rehabilitation tool that provides continuous and measurable real-time gait analysis of stroke survivors at home or in hospital environments.
The UK consortium will focus on developing the following advantages in this project: 1) Lightweight, (near) real-time markerless posture detection software - a mobile phone-based software platform can be a potential alternative solution to the conventional marker-based solution to assist the clinical gait assessment in/out hospital environment. 2) 5G-empowered tele-rehabilitation assessment platform - a low-cost clinical prognosis application in mobile application and 5G powered cloud computing service, to increase intelligence, computing efficiency, and power efficiency of single-camera based markerless systems. 3) End user lab validation -- as this is an end-user-focused project, our platform will be used in lab trials, which allow participants to have feedback on the system as well as formally validate the system performance using one of our golden standards marker-based 3D vision motion capture Vicon systems. Such validation data will undoubtedly increase the confidence and quality of using such a platform in healthcare trials during telerehabilitation sessions.

[0]: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/musculoskeletal-health-applying-all-our-health/musculoskeletal-health-applying-all-our-health?&_ga=2.115276103.1912366926.1697446670-288334124.1673605915#:~:text=MSK%20conditions%20account%20for%20the,%C2%A35%20billion%20each%20year.&text=The%20pain%20and%20disability%20of,family%2C%20social%20and%20working%20life