A hospital in Zhejiang, a region in eastern China, has established an air-ground channel employing 5G-A for blood transport by UAV. The Zhejiang hospital, is working with Hangzhou Antwork Network Technology. Currently, Hangzhou has established multiple blood delivery routes, creating the world’s first city-level regular blood delivery system. The establishment of the channel marks the use of the first regular UAV route for emergent blood delivery in China.

In China, more than 6 million patients need blood transfusions every year. Limited by traffic conditions, traditional blood transportation usually takes a long period of time. Medical resources are also unevenly distributed in urban and rural areas, making it difficult for patients from rural areas to seek medical treatments in urban hospitals, especially for those with mobility impairments.

To advance use of UAVs for medical services, China Telecom proposed a super air-ground convergence technology. Air-ground integrated smart beamforming technology is used to support integrated beam coordination and ground-to-air coverage, achieving 3.5 GHz low-altitude coverage in urban areas. New large-angle smart antennas that support power sharing are used to realise low-altitude coverage in suburban areas based on the wide coverage of 2.1 GHz bandwidth.

This super air-ground convergence technology was released during MWC Shanghai 2024. This technology forms an efficient ground-to-air private network, achieving continuous coverage at low altitudes.

In addition, sensing application services (AS), sensing functions (SF), and base station sensing devices form a high-precision medical sensing network. The network supports functions such as complex UAV trajectory analysis, geo-fence, and multi-object detection at the precision within one meter, escorting medical channels in air in real time.

Using these technologies and devices, the low-altitude network features high bandwidth and low latency and meets the 4K HD video backhaul requirements of UAVs. Medical resource delivery with UAVs is fast, flexible, and will not be affected by ground traffic conditions or weather conditions (scale-5 wind resistance).

The transportation efficiency has been improved by 60%, ensuring 24-hour instant response to urgent blood requests. The actual flight data indicates that the blood volume delivered per flight can meet the emergency use of one or two patients, while the transportation time per flight is just half of ground transportation under the same conditions, ensuring both “emergency blood use” and “planned blood replenishment.”

These technologies have also established more UAV highways from towns to towns, building a bridge between the central hospital of the medical consortium and the grassroots healthcare centres, and providing great support for the implementation of the hierarchical diagnosis and treatment system. For example, a patient can leave a blood sample in a community hospital, which will be delivered to the detection centre through the UAV. In dozens of minutes, the detection result will be available. This greatly improves the efficiency of medical treatments for the public.