XGMF and Human Augmentation Consortium Bring Human Augmentation into the 6G Ecosystem

Last month, Japan's XG Mobile Promotion Forum (XGMF) and the Human Augmentation Consortium announced that they had signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to cooperate on building and strengthening a global ecosystem for 6G. The stated objectives are particularly interesting. The two organisations want to work together towards the extension of sensory perception and physical movement via networks, while also creating new use cases for 6G.

I have written about XGMF as well as Human Augmentation previously. XGMF was created in April 2024 by bringing together Japan's 5G Mobile Promotion Forum (5GMF) and Beyond 5G Promotion Consortium (B5GPC). I looked at XGMF and some of its work around millimetre-wave technology in an earlier post on the Connectivity Technology Blog.

I also wrote about Human Augmentation through 6G networks back in 2023, particularly looking at NTT Docomo's work on sharing haptic information between people. The idea was that sensing information from one person could be transmitted across a network and reproduced for another person, potentially allowing touch, movement and other sensations to be shared remotely.

What is interesting about the latest announcement is that human augmentation has now moved well beyond an individual 6G research concept.

The Human Augmentation Consortium was established in December 2024 as part of the third phase of Japan's Cross-ministerial Strategic Innovation Promotion Program (SIP), led by the Cabinet Office. It brings together companies, universities and research organisations to develop use cases, demonstrate applications, devices and platforms, verify interoperability and pursue international standardisation.

Its latest white paper divides human augmentation into four broad categories:

  • Enhancement of physical capabilities, such as powered suits, exoskeletons and prosthetics
  • Perceptual enhancement, extending or sharing senses such as vision, hearing and touch
  • Cognitive enhancement, supporting memory, learning, understanding and other cognitive processes
  • Extension of existence, including telepresence and telexistence where people can interact with remote environments as though they were physically present there

This is therefore considerably broader than the haptic communication examples that attracted attention during the earlier stages of 6G research.

One example in the white paper involves capturing the hand movements of a professional pianist using sensors and transmitting the resulting information to an actuator worn by a learner. Another considers a medical professional wearing goggles and gloves remotely operating a robotic hand, with movement information sent towards the robot while video is returned to the operator.

These examples illustrate why communications become an important part of human augmentation rather than simply providing connectivity in the background.

The consortium describes the communication network as being similar to a nervous system, connecting devices, cloud applications and platforms. It identifies several network requirements that are particularly relevant to future 6G systems.

Low latency and low jitter become important when remote robots are being controlled through a feedback loop. Multiple data streams also need to remain synchronised. Receiving video, audio and force or tactile feedback at slightly different times could significantly degrade the experience or even make remote operation difficult.

Reliability becomes even more important for applications such as remote medical treatment or emergency response, where interrupted communications could potentially have safety consequences. Wide-area connectivity is another requirement, with the white paper considering remote operation in hazardous locations, at sea, underwater and even in space. Security is equally important because the information being transported could directly relate to a person's body, perceptions or cognition.

This provides an interesting connection with XGMF's increasingly broad 6G programme.

XGMF is no longer concentrating simply on a future radio interface. Its current 6G technical activities include advanced MIMO, wireless sensing, AI and digital twins, terminal-cooperative technologies, repeaters and RIS, radio propagation and millimetre-wave technologies for mobility. It is also running separate projects looking at 6G network architecture, NTN, terahertz communications and other areas.

The Human Augmentation Consortium can therefore potentially provide something extremely valuable to this work: application-driven requirements.

Instead of starting with a target such as lower latency or higher data rates and then searching for applications that might require it, human augmentation provides end-to-end scenarios from which the network requirements can be derived.

The performance requirement is then determined by the complete experience rather than any individual part of the communications system.

Standardisation may be another important area for cooperation.

The Human Augmentation Consortium's white paper already identifies work being carried out by organisations including ITU-T, ISO/IEC, IETF, Khronos, W3C and IEEE. However, it argues that common interfaces, communication protocols and data formats will be needed if devices, applications and platforms from different vendors are to interoperate.

Interestingly, the white paper says that existing standards activities cover parts of perceptual augmentation, cognitive augmentation and immersive experiences, but identifies gaps around areas such as telexistence and remote robot operation, including the communication protocols, data formats and architectures needed to control robots in a multi-vendor environment.

This is potentially where cooperation with a mobile-industry organisation such as XGMF becomes especially useful.

The Human Augmentation Consortium's white paper does not attempt to define 3GPP requirements. Instead, it works from the human augmentation ecosystem outwards, identifying devices, applications, platforms, interfaces and communications requirements. XGMF sits much closer to the 5G-Advanced and 6G network ecosystem.

Bringing those two perspectives together could help translate futuristic ideas such as shared senses, skill transfer and telexistence into much more concrete requirements for future networks.

There are still important issues beyond the communications technology.

The consortium highlights privacy, cybersecurity, unequal access to augmentation technologies and even questions around changes to personal identity. It argues that Ethical, Legal and Social Issues (ELSI) therefore need to develop alongside the technology.

Its white paper also acknowledges that 6G alone will not solve all the technical problems. Sensors need to become more accurate, devices smaller and lighter, batteries need to last longer, interfaces have to become interoperable, and the end-to-end system needs real-time performance measured in milliseconds. The paper identifies both 6G and All-Photonic Networks (APN) as technologies expected to help provide the ultra-low-latency communications needed for some of these applications.

The new MoU is still quite high-level. Neither organisation has yet announced specific joint trials, technical specifications, standards contributions or a detailed roadmap.

Nevertheless, it is an interesting development because it connects two parts of the 6G discussion that are often considered separately: the technologies being developed for future networks and the genuinely new human experiences those networks may eventually enable.

It will be worth watching whether the collaboration results in concrete human augmentation use cases that can feed measurable requirements into Japan's wider 6G research and standardisation activities.

The Human Augmentation Consortium's latest white paper provides a very good overview for anyone interested in exploring the topic further.

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