Medical Drone Technology
By: Nigel Whittle
Head of Medical & Healthcare
21st February 2018
There has been much spoken about the use of drones for delivery of commercial products. In 2013, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos claimed that drones would soon become ‘as normal as seeing mail trucks on the road’. However, despite significant expenditure and extensive testing programmes, that goal still seems a long way off. Meanwhile, use of drones has quietly moved forward in another significant sector…
One of the biggest challenges facing the provision of affordable healthcare in the developing world is the patchy distribution of facilities and expertise. In particular, remote rural areas often lack trained healthcare workers due to the difficulty in attracting such practitioners, and the general migration of better educated people to the cities. The problem can be compounded by a poor infrastructure of roads and other transport networks, and as a result it is not uncommon for patients to walk many miles over harsh terrain to consult a healthcare practitioner, who himself may have limited resources. And that walk may have to be repeated many times for further diagnosis and treatment.
A paradox of developing countries is that they are often capable of leap-frogging more advanced economies through infrastructure developments, in the same way that mobile networks have rapidly supplanted fixed line networks in many countries. Similarly, disruptive health technologies have the potential to transform the lives of millions of people in countries where access to healthcare is limited. This is because many novel diagnostic technologies are being designed for use at the point of care, where the need is most acute, rather than for the centralised hospital and laboratory systems found in the developed world. For example, rapid and affordable DNA-based tests for infectious diseases can not only provide sensitive indications of exposure to pathogens but can also indicate the correct course of treatment.
However, there still remains the problem of delivering appropriate medicines for treatment to the patient, while again avoiding an arduous trek to the doctor. Additionally, where such tests do not exist, health care in remote areas is still dependent on logistic support to transport samples to the nearest health centre and to transmit the result back to the clinic. In practice, this has meant reliance on land-based transport in the form of motorbikes or cars, which are vulnerable to the state of the roads.
Future Delivery of Medical Supplies
A solution that is being adopted in a number of countries is the use of Unmanned Autonomous Vehicles (UAVs), or drones. Drones have the potential to make the transport of drugs, vaccines or medical aids much faster and more efficient, due to their ability to be rapidly deployed and to function in conditions that are unsuitable for wheeled vehicles. Perhaps the most impressive example is Zipline International, a Silicon Valley start-up that uses drones to deliver medicine and blood to rural clinics in Rwanda. This system for the delivery of life-saving medicines, established well in advance of the introduction of pizza delivery in developed countries, has been so successful that the company plans to launch a further system in Tanzania in 2018.
The organisation is now functioning so well that health workers at remote clinics and hospitals can simply text orders for necessary medical products to Zipline, and within minutes those products are loaded from distribution centres onto drones, arriving by parachute 15 minutes later for what would previously have been a 4-hour journey. Having this agile supply chain can make a massive difference in the provision of critical healthcare to patients and is hugely effective at empowering doctors.
It seems likely that the use of drones for distribution of high-value items in remote and adverse environments will only grow, leading to an increasing need for enhanced control and navigation systems. For technology companies to take advantage of this, solutions will need to be designed specifically with drones in mind. This means miniaturised systems with minimal size, weight and power factors to allow for deployment. We’ve pushed the development of enhanced control and navigation further through our micro-radar system, using mm-wave frequencies from a miniaturised antenna to allow for navigation of difficult terrain in all weather conditions.
These unmanned drones offer a remarkable example of how a technology from one industry can facilitate the provision of life-saving care in another sector, either for ‘routine’ use or to help in circumstances when time is crucial, such as natural disasters or medical emergencies. It may be that the use of these medical drones drives the breakthrough in adoption that will see Jeff Bezos’ vision come to fruition.
There has been much spoken about the use of drones for delivery of commercial products. In 2013, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos claimed that drones would soon become ‘as normal as seeing mail trucks on the road’. However, despite significant expenditure and extensive testing programmes, that goal still seems a long way off. Meanwhile, use of drones has quietly moved forward in another significant sector…
One of the biggest challenges facing the provision of affordable healthcare in the developing world is the patchy distribution of facilities and expertise. In particular, remote rural areas often lack trained healthcare workers due to the difficulty in attracting such practitioners, and the general migration of better educated people to the cities. The problem can be compounded by a poor infrastructure of roads and other transport networks, and as a result it is not uncommon for patients to walk many miles over harsh terrain to consult a healthcare practitioner, who himself may have limited resources. And that walk may have to be repeated many times for further diagnosis and treatment.
A paradox of developing countries is that they are often capable of leap-frogging more advanced economies through infrastructure developments, in the same way that mobile networks have rapidly supplanted fixed line networks in many countries. Similarly, disruptive health technologies have the potential to transform the lives of millions of people in countries where access to healthcare is limited. This is because many novel diagnostic technologies are being designed for use at the point of care, where the need is most acute, rather than for the centralised hospital and laboratory systems found in the developed world. For example, rapid and affordable DNA-based tests for infectious diseases can not only provide sensitive indications of exposure to pathogens but can also indicate the correct course of treatment.
However, there still remains the problem of delivering appropriate medicines for treatment to the patient, while again avoiding an arduous trek to the doctor. Additionally, where such tests do not exist, health care in remote areas is still dependent on logistic support to transport samples to the nearest health centre and to transmit the result back to the clinic. In practice, this has meant reliance on land-based transport in the form of motorbikes or cars, which are vulnerable to the state of the roads.
Future Delivery of Medical Supplies
A solution that is being adopted in a number of countries is the use of Unmanned Autonomous Vehicles (UAVs), or drones. Drones have the potential to make the transport of drugs, vaccines or medical aids much faster and more efficient, due to their ability to be rapidly deployed and to function in conditions that are unsuitable for wheeled vehicles. Perhaps the most impressive example is Zipline International, a Silicon Valley start-up that uses drones to deliver medicine and blood to rural clinics in Rwanda. This system for the delivery of life-saving medicines, established well in advance of the introduction of pizza delivery in developed countries, has been so successful that the company plans to launch a further system in Tanzania in 2018.
The organisation is now functioning so well that health workers at remote clinics and hospitals can simply text orders for necessary medical products to Zipline, and within minutes those products are loaded from distribution centres onto drones, arriving by parachute 15 minutes later for what would previously have been a 4-hour journey. Having this agile supply chain can make a massive difference in the provision of critical healthcare to patients and is hugely effective at empowering doctors.
It seems likely that the use of drones for distribution of high-value items in remote and adverse environments will only grow, leading to an increasing need for enhanced control and navigation systems. For technology companies to take advantage of this, solutions will need to be designed specifically with drones in mind. This means miniaturised systems with minimal size, weight and power factors to allow for deployment. We’ve pushed the development of enhanced control and navigation further through our micro-radar system, using mm-wave frequencies from a miniaturised antenna to allow for navigation of difficult terrain in all weather conditions.
These unmanned drones offer a remarkable example of how a technology from one industry can facilitate the provision of life-saving care in another sector, either for ‘routine’ use or to help in circumstances when time is crucial, such as natural disasters or medical emergencies. It may be that the use of these medical drones drives the breakthrough in adoption that will see Jeff Bezos’ vision come to fruition.
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