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 Researchers ran 18 simulations comparing how long it took a drone
and traditional EMS to reach various locations within a 10-kilometer
(6.2 mile) radius of a fire station north of Stockholm. The drone
consistently beat typical EMS response times, by almost 17 minutes
in half of the cases.
“With drones carrying automated external defibrillators (AEDs) we
may increase chances of survival significantly (by) delivering an
AED within the very first minutes,” said lead study author Andreas
Claesson of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm.
In cardiac arrest, the heart stops abruptly, often due to irregular
heart rhythms. Cardiac arrest may occur with no warning and is often
fatal unless the heart can be restarted quickly.
Only about one in 10 patients typically survive a cardiac arrest
when it happens outside a hospital, and reducing the time it takes
to shock the heart back into a normal rhythm with a defibrillator is
the biggest factor influencing survival odds, the researchers note
in JAMA.
Automated external defibrillators are already common in public
places like restaurants and airports. These devices typically have
electrodes that attach to the chest with sticky pads and deliver
shocks based on what a computer in the defibrillator determines the
person needs.
Someday, emergency dispatchers might be able to respond to cardiac
arrests by sending out drones with defibrillators that bystanders at
the scene could use on cardiac arrest patients until EMS arrived.
This shift might be especially helpful for improving survival odds
in remote rural areas and resort communities that swell in
population during the summer months, Claesson said by email.
The drone used in the study was equipped with a global positioning
system (GPS), a high-definition camera and an autopilot software
system. Even though it could use GPS to fly on autopilot, a pilot
was present at the landing locations and the dispatcher could take
over the drone for descent if necessary.
For the study, researchers pitted the drone’s performance in test
flights conducted over 72 hours in October 2016 to the actual
dispatch and arrival times for EMS in real cardiac arrest cases that
occurred from 2006 to 2014.
Half of the emergencies in the simulations were at least 3.2
kilometers (2 miles) away from the fire station. In half of the
cases, the drone took no more than three seconds to take off after
the emergency calls came in, compared with three minutes for EMS.
With the drone, the time from dispatch to arrival at the scene of
the emergency was only about five minutes in half of the cases,
compared with 22 minutes for EMS.
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Limitations of the study include the small number of test flights,
which were all done in good weather, the authors note.
The drones also had some advantages in this experiment that they
might not have in real life, said Dr. Peter Pons, a professor
emeritus of emergency medicine at the University of Colorado School
of Medicine in Denver who wasn’t involved in the study.
Drones, for example, might not work well in bad weather and might
have a limited flight range, Pons said by email.
At the same time, an ambulance involves several steps, including
getting the necessary information on the location and the patient,
notifying and assembling an EMS crew, and then getting the ambulance
underway, Pons said.
For the same cost it might require to build a drone network just to
deliver defibrillators to cardiac arrest patients, it might be
possible to instead expand EMS services to speed response times in
all types of emergencies, Pons said.
Still, he thinks drones could make a big difference in cardiac
arrest survival odds.
“The time savings reported in this letter would clearly provide a
meaningful improvement in the outcome of victims of cardiac arrest,”
Pons said. “We know that for each minute that CPR and defibrillation
are delayed, survival from cardiac arrest decreases.”
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/2sYZ6Yv JAMA, online June 13, 2017.
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