Healthcare Partnership Creates Testbed for Advanced Connectivity and AI Applications

Hospitals face growing care complexity, aging populations, and pressure to extend monitoring beyond traditional inpatient settings. Meeting these demands requires more responsive clinical workflows and reliable digital infrastructure that can connect devices, care teams, and hospital operations across clinical and home environments. Building on this approach, NUHS, Singtel, and Ericsson have expanded their partnership to explore advanced connectivity, artificial intelligence, and future connected healthcare applications.

The National University Health System (NUHS; Singapore), Singtel, and Ericsson have signed a Memorandum of Understanding to advance connected healthcare through 5G-Advanced, future 6G technology, and connected intelligence. As part of the collaboration, Singtel and Ericsson will become founding partners of the National University XG AI Centre, which will serve as a translational research and development platform for network-enabled healthcare applications.

The National University XG AI Centre, or NXAC, is designed to bring together expertise from healthcare, telecommunications, and technology. NUHS will provide clinical, academic, and research leadership, while Ericsson will contribute mobile network technology, network architecture, and 6G research expertise. Singtel will support advanced network deployment and services, providing the connectivity foundation for developing and evaluating new healthcare applications.

NXAC will operate as a hospital-based testbed where clinicians, nurses, operations teams, and industry partners can jointly develop and evaluate technologies in working clinical environments. Planned areas of focus include ambient artificial intelligence for clinical workflows, contactless monitoring, earlier risk detection, spatial intelligence, connected medical devices, wearables, autonomous robotics, and medical extended reality. The program will initially use 5G and 5G-Advanced capabilities and is intended to evolve toward early 6G technologies as they become available.

The partnership builds on five years of collaboration in advanced connectivity for healthcare. The work began with 5G infrastructure in 2021 and expanded with the deployment of an indoor 5G network at National University Hospital in 2022. When fully commissioned in November 2023, the network provided coverage across 10 operating theaters and three inpatient wards, establishing a foundation for the partners’ broader connected healthcare initiatives.

“Our interest in advanced networks and AI lies in what they can do for our patients across our 14 entities, and the healthcare professionals who care for them. By bringing together clinical and industry expertise, we hope to harness future generations of telecommunications technology into practical healthcare applications. These range from autonomous mobile robots supporting hospital logistics and patient care, to connected mobile devices that extend care into the home, AI-enabled intelligent fabric for the healthcare industry, and human augmentation for advanced surgeries,” said Professor Yeoh Khay Guan, Chief Executive, NUHS.

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