5G-Supported Disease Monitoring

Introduction

Pandemic situations as recently seen with COVID-19 have generated significant impacts and challenges around the world. Some of these challenges are related to the ability to identify areas of risk and persons having visit such areas, warn citizens to avoid such areas, and warn individuals who might have been in contact with an infected person. Not only in the current pandemic it is important to hold technical means to monitor, analyze, inform, and alert people in such risk situations. Consequently, many mobile contact tracing applications, such as collected by the European Commission (EC, 2021), already exist.

Nevertheless, due to the recent developments, researchers and industry groups around the world have focused their investigations upon solutions applicable to the current pandemic situation (COVID applications, 2021). Regional and regulatory legislation bodies such as the UK national health service (NHS, 2021), the German Federal Government (FG, 2021), and the (Australian Government, 2021) place an emphasis on data and privacy protection when finding technical solutions for tracking infected people or alerting others nearby. It can be observed that many of those methods suggested use trajectory information of humans collected on their personal devices.

Solutions can be categorized into two areas, namely disease surveillance and contact tracing. Automated disease surveillance and progression alongside detection of risk areas (exposure to infected people) and digital contact tracing has been the goal in many cases. But often these applications lack interoperability with existing systems (for instance due to separate developments per country or per device manufacturer) which seek at aiming or resulting in solutions 'solely' applicable. This is for instance found especially when specific solution development is undertaken and funded, and targeted for a particular deployment within one country, reflecting the planned use of the application solely for that country and its own people. One of the reasons behind are the various legislative requirements per country and their different handling of personal data. Nonetheless, arrangements of a general kind do exist to manage and to accommodate various information and telecommunication technologies, which aim to close the gap and, hence, focus on the development of interoperable solutions. Examples include work done in international standardization organizations such as the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI, n.d.) and in the third-generation partnership project (3GPP, n.d.).

The objective of this chapter is to explain and outline possibilities that the interoperable standards on 5G technology, as described in Chandramouli (2019), offer for disease monitoring and digital contact tracing. This includes the 5G standards' new enablers for network analytics and corresponding requirements on privacy and data protection. The scheme proposed in this chapter allows an alert to be generated for mobile device owners having been present at a certain time in a certain area that has been determined to be or having been an area of increased risk, e.g., for COVID-19 infection. It also allows to provide information for government agencies on user mobility patterns and hotspot areas, with such information playing a crucial role in the fight against the disease.

This chapter starts with a background on disease monitoring as well as an outline of the 5G System and selected components of the 5G architecture. After discussing the advantages of interoperable solutions that standards can provide, data and privacy protection principles related to monitoring technologies are described. Following an introduction to the 5G System and its enablers, the authors present possible solutions for disease monitoring using 5G and conclude with considerations of effects of using those proposed methods.