Beyond the Hype: Building the 6G Foundation for Global Healthcare

BERLIN – November 25, 2025

The vision for the future of healthcare is one of seamless data, predictive intelligence, and universal access. It’s a world where a patient’s vital signs are monitored continuously from home, where AI algorithms detect disease before symptoms appear, and where a surgeon in Berlin can consult on a procedure in a remote village. Yet, this vision remains constrained by a fundamental bottleneck: the digital infrastructure that underpins it. Current networks, including 5G, were not purpose-built for the sheer scale and complexity that this future demands.

Beneath the surface of the global technology race, however, the foundational work for this transformation is underway. In a significant move, Berlin-based IoT connectivity specialist emnify has joined ORIGAMI, a flagship EU-funded research project. This initiative isn't about faster movie downloads; it's about architecting the very nervous system of our connected future—6G. By providing critical, real-world use cases, emnify and its partners are ensuring that the next generation of mobile networks is built not just for phones, but for the billions of medical devices that will redefine how we deliver and experience care.

Architecting the Future of Connected Health

To understand the significance of this work, one must look past the consumer-facing promises of each new wireless generation. The leap from 5G to 6G is less about a linear speed increase and more about a fundamental architectural redesign. The ORIGAMI project aims to deliver this through three core innovations: a Global Service-Based Architecture (GSBA), a Zero-Trust Exposure Layer (ZTL), and a Compute Continuum Layer (CCL).

For healthcare, these are not abstract acronyms; they are the enabling technologies for a more resilient and secure system. The GSBA promises to break down the walled gardens of today's telecom operators, creating a globally interoperable network fabric. This is critical for tracking a pharmaceutical shipment from a factory in Europe to a clinic in Africa or managing a fleet of medical devices deployed across continents. The ZTL, meanwhile, moves security from a perimeter-based defense to an intrinsic, non-negotiable property of the network itself—an absolute necessity when dealing with sensitive patient data.

The involvement of a cloud-native IoT provider like emnify is what grounds this ambitious research in reality. While telecom giants build the highways, specialists like emnify understand the unique needs of the vehicles—in this case, the vast and varied world of IoT devices. They provide the use cases, from smart hospital asset trackers to remote diagnostic tools, that stress-test the architectural designs. As emnify's Co-founder and founding CTO, Martin Giess, stated, “By contributing real-world IoT operator use cases to ORIGAMI, we’re ensuring that 6G architectures evolve to better support global providers like us - and ultimately, empower enterprises worldwide.”

The Geopolitical Race for Technological Sovereignty

The ORIGAMI project is more than a technical endeavor; it’s a key piece of Europe’s strategy in the high-stakes global race for 6G dominance. The European Commission, through its Smart Networks and Services Joint Undertaking (SNS JU), is investing nearly a billion euros to foster technological sovereignty and prevent the continent from becoming a mere consumer of technologies developed in the US or China. This public-private partnership model, bringing together academic institutions like the University of Würzburg, research labs like NEC Laboratories Europe, and a mix of corporate giants (Telefónica) and agile scale-ups (emnify), is Europe’s gambit to lead the definition of the next global standard.

Whoever writes the rules of 6G will hold a distinct advantage in shaping the strategic industries that will run on it, chief among them being digital health and advanced manufacturing. By embedding the needs of complex, global IoT deployments into the standard from day one, Europe can foster an ecosystem where its med-tech and biotech industries can thrive. It’s a long-term play for economic and strategic resilience.

This proactive role is a departure from merely reacting to new standards. “The insights we gain from ORIGAMI directly inform the evolution of our platform,” noted Artur Michalczyk, Chief Technology Officer at emnify. “We’re not only preparing for the 6G era - we’re helping define how IoT devices will connect, communicate and stay secure on a global scale.” This active participation ensures that the future network is fit for purpose, capable of supporting the mission-critical applications that healthcare will increasingly rely upon.

Closing the Last-Mile Gap in Healthcare

Perhaps the most profound impact of this next-generation infrastructure lies in its potential to solve healthcare's persistent “last-mile” problem. Today, access to advanced care is still largely dictated by geography. The solution lies in extending the network's reach beyond terrestrial towers, seamlessly integrating it with Non-Terrestrial Networks (NTNs), particularly low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellites.

This is the focus of emnify’s second major research initiative, NaSA-OMI, a collaboration with the University of Würzburg. The project is exploring how to apply advanced AI to manage the immense complexity of these hybrid networks, ensuring reliability and security as a device moves from a city’s 6G network to a satellite link in a rural area. While companies like Starlink and AST SpaceMobile are already proving the viability of direct-to-device satellite connectivity, projects like NaSA-OMI are developing the intelligence layer needed to make these networks robust enough for healthcare.

Imagine a chronic disease patient in a remote community equipped with a smart medical patch. The NaSA-OMI research is aimed at building a system that can guarantee the data from that patch is transmitted reliably, detect any anomalies in the satellite link, and ensure its integrity as it travels to a hospital's cloud platform hundreds of miles away. As Prof. Tobias Hoßfeld of the University of Würzburg explained, “emnify’s practical experience with a broad range of IoT use cases and device types brings invaluable insight to our research.”

This fusion of terrestrial 6G and advanced satellite networks is what will finally unlock the promise of ubiquitous remote patient monitoring, global supply chain integrity for temperature-sensitive biologics, and real-time expert consultations for underserved populations. The foundational work being done in these European consortia is not just about connecting devices; it is about methodically dismantling the geographic barriers that have long created inequities in care, paving the way for a truly global and patient-centered health system.