When someone is experiencing cardiac arrest, the time taken to receive treatment is often the deciding factor between life and death. Public defibrillators are becoming increasingly common, but if you're untrained, they can be tricky to operate properly, plus they're not widespread enough to service all cardiac arrest patients. So an engineering student from Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands has proposed a solution - an ambulance drone that can fly a defibrillator to the patient within a fraction of the time it takes emergency services to arrive. The ambulance drone is a hexacopter that can travel to a location within 12 square kilometres in about a minute. According to Alec Momont, the designer of the drone, this quick response can increase a heart attack patient’s chances of survival tenfold.When a patient has a heart attack and an emergency call is placed, the drone is able to track the location of the call using an in-built GPS for navigation, and fly there at a speed of 100 kilometres per hour. Upon landing, an operator tunes in like a paramedic, giving instructions to someone nearby on how to use the defibrillator to treat the patient. The drone also has an in-built camera that allows the operator to ensure the defibrillator is being used correctly.
