Table 7.

Summary of Healthcare 4.0 challenges.

Challenges	Issues with Healthcare 4.0	Key Solutions
Energy	Healthcare 4.0 systems should support a ten-year battery life of medical sensors. Thus, communication networks and protocols used for such systems should meet this demand.	Energy-efficient network algorithms Edge computing Quantum computing
Bandwidth	With the growing use of telemedicine and other remote healthcare services, communication networks must be able to facilitate high-quality video and audio streaming with sufficient bandwidth. Healthcare 4.0 faces significant difficulty in allocating resources optimally for vital medical traffic.	Edge computing 5G communications D2D
Network availability and reliability	Achieving ultra-high availability and reliability is a challenge that needs to be resolved by introducing novel technologies.	5G communications D2D Edge computing Edge intelligence
End-to-end latency	A part of the Healthcare 4.0 services are ultra-low latency services that require an end-to-end latency of 5-1 msec for the communicated data. This puts many constraints on the development of such networks.	Edge computing Edge intelligence Software-defined networking
Security	The required security level of Healthcare 4.0 applications cannot be achieved by the existing traditional schemes. Also, traditional security protocols cannot meet the energy demands of Healthcare 4.0.	Trust management Blockchain Quantum encryption
Scalability	The designed networks and protocols for Healthcare 4.0 applications should support high scalability since medical devices are growing rapidly.	5G communications D2D Edge computing
Massive data	The massive amount of network traffic due to numerous devices deployed in the network should be managed using robust methods to avoid network failure.	Big data D2D Edge computing Blockchain