A New First Responder: How Drones May Revolutionize Healthcare

A new article published last week in the European Heart Journal discusses the use of drones for delivering life-saving automated external defibrillators (AED) to out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA) patients. As the study describes, "Early treatment in line with the'chain-of-survival' concept such as cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) and defibrillation by an automated external defibrillator (AED) prior to ambulance arrival is associated with increased survival. Use of AEDs in the early-cardiac-arrest electrical phase can increase survival rates to up to 50–70%. Although hundreds of thousands of AEDs are available in high-income countries, their accessibility and use are still low." Thus, the investigators of the study designed a system to deploy drones to real-life suspected OHCA patients in order to determine whether this was a viable solution to the accessibility problem.