Drones Helping To Save People’s Lives
We hear a lot about the use of drones for fun and photography, delivering small packages and being a nuisance but less about them helping save lives.
Nevertheless, they have been deployed in that role for five years now. The first recorded successful life-saving by drone was in May 2013 when a model with thermal imaging helped find a Canadian man lost in the snow.
Just two weeks ago seven swimmers were pulled out to sea by an undertow at Valencia in Spain.
One started to drown and the other six were struggling to keep her above water. Whilst they mobilised, lifeguards sent out an eight-rotor drone with an on board camera and carrying two automatically inflating lifejackets.
The drone got a lifejacket to the woman far more quickly than the lifeguards could get there and the other one was not needed.
The drone then tracked the party, marking their location to assist a prompt manual retrieval.
The University of Delft in the Netherlands has been working on ambulance drones.
Their idea is that a network of such drones can be set up with basis life-saving kits, such as defibrillators, suitable for use by a lay person.
These could then be deployed to an incident, particularly in more remote or inaccessible terrain, in a fraction of the time it would take paramedics to get there, giving maximum chance of survival until the professionals arrive.
Australia, China and the US are other countries that have embraced drones for getting emergency kit to the scene of an incident quickly. Here, the Coastguards and RNLI ‘began trials’ in April. We have some catching up to do.
