A lesson learned during the pandemic is that social distancing saves lives. As it was shown recently, the healthcare industry is structured in a way that cannot protect medical staff from possible infectious diseases, such as COVID-19. Today’s healthcare services seem anachronistic and not convenient for both doctors and patients. Although there have been several advances in recent years, especially in developed countries, the need for a holistic change is imperative. Evidently, future technologies should be introduced in the health sector, where Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, Artificial Intelligence, and Tactile Internet can have vast applications. Thus, the healthcare industry could take advantage of the great evolution of pervasive computing. In this paper, we point out the challenges from the current visualization techniques and present a novel visualization technique assisted with haptics which is enhanced with artificial intelligent algorithms in order to offer remote patient examination and treatment through robotics. Such an approach provides a more detailed method of medical image data visualization and eliminates the possibility of diseases spreading, while reducing the workload of the medical staff.

The increasing popularity of virtual reality and augmented reality applications has unveiled the need for boosting the efforts of implementing extended reality (XR) to users. An analogous high interest from both academia and industry is being shown for tactile Internet (TI). The ever-increasing use of virtualization technologies makes the usage of haptic communication even more important in order to create robust tangible systems, but also to achieve an optimal and faster balance among the interaction modalities, as well as between humans and machines. The current wireless mobile networks cannot provide ultra-low latency, massive computational capability, and high communication bandwidth, requirements that are crucial for applications, such as XR and TI. A simplified tangible XR system is proposed accompanied with the opportunities and challenges of such an implementation.

Current medical methods still confront numerous limitations and barriers to detect and fight against illnesses and disorders. The introduction of emerging technologies in the healthcare industry is anticipated to enable novel medical techniques for an efficient and effective smart healthcare system. Internet of Things (IoT), Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN), Big Data Analytics (BDA), and Cloud Computing (CC) can play a vital role in the instant detection of illnesses, diseases, viruses, or disorders. Complicated techniques such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), and Deep Learning (DL) could provide acceleration in drug and antibiotics discovery. Moreover, the integration of visualization techniques such as Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), and Mixed Reality (MR) with Tactile Internet (TI), can be applied from the medical staff to provide the most accurate diagnosis and treatment for the patients. A novel system architecture, which combines several future technologies, is proposed in this paper. The objective is to describe the integration of a mixture of emerging technologies in assistance with advanced networks to provide a smart healthcare system that may be established in hospitals or medical centers. Such a system will be able to deliver immediate and accurate data to the medical stuff in order to aim them in order to provide precise patient diagnosis and treatment.

Today, healthcare system models should have high accuracy and sensitivity so that patients do not have a misdiagnosis. For this reason, sufficient knowledge of the area is required, with the medical staff being able to validate the correctness of their decisions. Therefore, artificial intelligence (AI) in combination with other emerging technologies could provide many benefits in the medical sector. In this paper, we demonstrate the combination of Internet of Things (IoT) and cloud computing (CC) with AI-related techniques such as artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), deep learning (DL), and neural networks (NN) in order to provide a useful approach for scientists and doctors. Our proposed model makes use of these immersive technologies so as to provide epidemic forecasting and help accelerate drug and antibiotic discovery.