A research simulation by the American Heart Association (AHA) shows that a drone delivery system may improve access to automated external defibrillators (AEDs) saving the lives of patients having a cardiac arrest.
AEDs are portable devices that shock the heart rhythm back to normal when experiencing an out-of-hospital life-threatening traumatic injury. More than 350,000 cardiac arrests happen outside of a hospital each year. The survival rate is only about 10%, AHA said.
Bystander CPR, including the use of an AED, is critical during these events and can more than double or triple a chance of survival. However, AEDs are hard to acquire when these events happen, particularly in rural areas.
Simulation model
Researchers at AHA developed a simulation model to estimate how quickly an AED could be delivered to the scene of a cardiac arrest in 19 counties in North Carolina.
In the simulation, EMS, firefighters and police officers would carry an AED; an optimized network of AED-carrying drones was also analyzed. The simulation compared the times of an AED arrival on the scene between the local first responders and the drones.
Researchers found a drone could have an AED delivered in five minutes, resulting in an:
- Improved arrival time of AEDs by 77% in urban areas
- Improved arrival time of AEDs by 23% in rural areas
- Reduce response time to 4 minutes in urban areas
- Reduce response time to 7.1 minutes in rural areas
“We were a bit surprised that the improvements appeared greater in the urban areas,” said Jamal Chu, a Ph.D. student at the University of Toronto and lead in the AHA research. “There’s an historical inequity in EMS response times in rural versus urban areas, so we anticipated that drones could provide a bigger improvement in response times in rural areas and, thus, reduce that inequity.”
Chu said future development of drone delivery systems would need to consider demography, geography and historical EMS response times of the region.
The AHA is currently working on a real-life implementation of drone-delivered AEDs in North Carolina using the findings in the simulation to refine the drone delivery systems.
“The biggest limitation of this study is that it is computational,” Chu said. “Going from computational analysis to implementation will include many hurdles in terms of regulations, infrastructure and community. For example, we assumed whenever an AED was delivered, a bystander would retrieve it and apply it to the patient. Community education programs would have to be integrated with a drone program to achieve this high level of use.”
The research will be shown at the upcoming AHA’s Resuscitation Science Symposium 2023 taking place Nov. 11-12 in Philadelphia.
