Emergency drones rush life-saving help to simulated cardiac arrest cases

Enlarge / An emergency medical drone coming to the rescue. (credit: JAMA)

Thanks to drones, condoms have rained down on villages in rural Africa. Remote islands have quickly received medical supplies, while researchers have winged biological specimens to distant pathology labs.

Now, a research group in Sweden is buzzing about yet another type of life-saving flight for the unmanned aerial vehicles-emergency medical flights.

Reenacting 18 real-life emergency calls of cardiac arrest to emergency medical services in Norrtilje, Sweden, researchers dispatched a drone carrying an automated external defibrillator (AED) from the local fire station. The drone reached the site of the emergency in around five minutes-about 16 minutes faster than emergency medical responders-researchers report Tuesday in JAMA.

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