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platform are not as rich as in a cloud data centre.
MEC concept was introduced to offer specialized
services that do not scale up to typical services
with higher scalability. Therefore, applications
which are consuming and demanding higher
resources as in UC 1 and UC 3, MEC is limited to
serving only ten and one application instance as
specified in Table 1. Furthermore, in a pragmatic
situation where all three proposed use cases are
operating simultaneously, load balancing the
resources of the MEC platform is an obvious
challenge. Thus, a dynamic service provisioning
control framework is a prime requirement.
Possible Solutions: Allocation of excessive
resources are the only means for mitigating scalability issues. For MEC deployments-if the
existing resources are inadequate to launch the
services-most recommended method is to
append more resources into the system. However, if there is another MEC enabled BS in close
proximity, such services can be either migrated
to the novel MEC BS, or the content to be processed can be offloaded to it. Furthermore, in an
overwhelming situation, MEC BS can offload the
service to a cloud platform while balancing the
load of its own platform.

Legal Adaptation and Ethics
" Robot ethics, " a branch of machine ethics, is
a clear application for healthcare robotics that
are used in both use cases 1 and 3. Eventhough
the robots are human controlled, an intentional
or unintentional malfunction would cause harm
to human beings that imply ethical and legal
repercussions. Thus, robot ethics deal with such
dilemmas in a legal context, for the purpose of
prioritizing human safety, ensuring superior
human command, and protecting the robots'
own existence without inflicting harm to human
beings.29 In the proposed applications, such
standards on ethical conduct should be clearly
defined and practised as these human-tomachine interactions might create unforeseen
conundrums. The user consent is imperative in
such a circumstance. Furthermore, aggregation of
healthcare data should be pursued in accordance
to the EU General Data Protection Regulation
standards30 for ensuring the privacy of patients
and health care officials. When a hospital or a medical institute is digitizing their holistic system, a

March/April 2021

legal framework should be established to govern
all the entities within the institutions jurisdiction.
All the unspecified legalities regarding the cyberdomain should be contextualized, prior to practicing these novel medical applications since the
causes might be quite lethal.

CONCLUSION
Main intention of this article was to emphasize the significance of MEC resembled edge
computing platforms for futuristic applications
in health care; that would be beneficial in
mediating a pandemic situation similar to
COVID-19. The proposed use cases are requiring an IT eco-system that optimize the network
and computational utilization to novel extents
that reach beyond prevailing limitations. Proposed use cases are demanding higher level of
specifications. Therefore, it is obvious that the
use cases cannot be achieved with an absence
of a storage and processing infrastructure in a
proximate distance. Thus, the proposed use
cases are realizable with MEC platforms
deployed within medical institutions. The findings of this research are beneficial for state-ofthe-art medical companies to form an IT infrastructure that launches their applications with
featured synergism.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This work was supported in part by European
Union in RESPONSE 5G (Grant No. 789658) and in
part by Academy of Finland in 6Genesis (Grant
No. 318927) projects. The authors would like to
acknowledge the contribution of the COST
action CA16226 (SHELD-ON) project.

& REFERENCES
1. M. Cascella, M. Rajnik, A. Cuomo, S. C. Dulebohn, and
R. Di Napoli, Features, Evaluation and Treatment
Coronavirus (COVID-19), Statpearls [internet], 2020.
2. H. Zhu et al., " Smart healthcare in the era of internet-ofthings, " IEEE Consum. Electron. Mag., vol. 8, no. 5,
pp. 26-30, Sep. 2019.
s, and J. Jorba, " Towards the
3. A. J. Ferrer, J. M. Marque
decentralised cloud: Survey on approaches and
challenges for mobile, ad hoc, and edge computing, "
ACM Comput. Surv., vol. 51, no. 6, pp. 1-36, 2019.

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