On the Possibilities and Significance of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles for the Pre- Hospital Stage of Medical Care

Abstract

Unmanned aerial vehicles are an important force in search and rescue operations. They help reduce the time needed to search for and provide assistance to the wounded, sick and injured who are located at a large territorial distance and in hard-to-reach places. With the help of computer “vision” and sensors such as noise sensing, binary sensing, vibration and thermal sensing, drones are able to search for living patients not only in the sea, high in the mountains and in mines, but also buried under the rubble of buildings and structures. Such devices demonstrate advantages in emergency and urgent delivery of medical resuscitation and other medical equipment, medicines, blood products and organs for transplantation to patients, especially those in remote locations. With the help of drones, it is possible to effectively sort patients in case of mass sanitary losses, carry out disinfection and remotely monitor the health status of patients with highly contagious infectious diseases and other pathological conditions, as well as reduce the time for providing other medical and humanitarian services to the population. It is obvious that the use of drones requires further study of their promising capabilities, especially in the actual conditions of emergency medical services.

Keywords

• unmanned aerial vehicles
• drones
• pre-hospital stage
• search and rescue operations
• emergency and emergency medical care