Secure Zero-Touch Edge Cloud Framework for 6G Enabled e-Health Systems: A Reference Architecture for Injury Tracking in Sports Education

Abstract

The convergence of 6G networking, medical IoT, and edge-cloud intelligence is creating new opportunities for latency-sensitive and data-intensive e-health services, yet real-world deployment remains constrained by fragmented interfaces, inconsistent semantics, limited trust orchestration, and insufficient conformance evidence. This study addresses these challenges through a secure zero-touch edge-cloud framework for 6G-enabled e-health systems, using injury tracking in sports education as a representative healthcare use case. The framework spans the device, gateway, campus MEC, clinical edge, and cloud domains, with explicit separation of data, control, management/orchestration, and trust planes to support low-latency analytics, policy-driven service continuity, and privacy-preserving operations. It identifies six interoperability touchpoints and corresponding deployment profiles for real-time alerting, rehabilitation monitoring, and telemedicine or clinical review; defines a privacy-preserving collaborative analytics profile for consent-aware data use, minimization, real-time edge inference, and governed federated or incremental model updates; and introduces a benchmarking and conformance workflow that links scenario-based KPI measurement to interface validation and structured evidence generation. The main contribution is a practical engineering pathway from architectural principles to deployment-ready systems through profile-driven design, secure zero-touch interoperability, policy-bound analytics, and validation. Although demonstrated through injury tracking in sports education, the proposed approach is applicable to broader 6G e-health scenarios requiring trustworthy automation, low-latency service delivery, privacy-aware collaboration, and interoperable, multi-vendor integration.