Defibrillator-carrying drones can help save the lives of people who experience cardiac arrest, Swedish doctors have reported.
Dr Jacob Hollenberg at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden and colleagues looked at the effectiveness of drones for delivering a defibrillator to an emergency scene faster than an ambulance.
The Swedish Transportation Agency developed and certified drones carrying defibrillators and equipped with a GPS and high-definition camera.
These were sent out from a fire station in rural Stockholm to locations within ten kilometres, having a median distance of 3.2 kilometres.
After 18 flights, the average time to destination was five minutes 21 seconds, compared with an average 22 minutes for an ambulance.
The study was published yesterday evening (13 June) in The Journal of the American Medical Association.
"Saving 16 minutes is likely to be clinically important," write the authors. "Nonetheless, further test flights, technological development, and evaluation of integration with dispatch centres and aviation administrators are needed.
"The outcomes of out-of-hospital cardiac arrest using the drone-delivered automated external defibrillator by bystanders versus resuscitation by emergency medical services should be studied."
Dr Hollenberg added: "If we can decrease the time in cardiac arrest from collapse to defibrillation by a few minutes, hundreds of lives would be saved each year."
Claesson, A. et al. Time to Delivery of an Automated External Defibrillator Using a Drone for Simulated Out-of-Hospital Cardiac Arrests vs Emergency Medical Services. JAMA 13 June 2017 doi: 10.1001/jama.2017.3957 [abstract]
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