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Drones delivering blood

Simone Maas
3 jun 2016
2 minuten om te lezen

If you still have not heard of drones, you must have been living under a rock for the past 2 years. This gaunt hovercraft was first introduced in 2014 and has since then been deployed for many purposes. You can for example use drones to make really cool movie-shots, to send out an internet-signal or even to do research. Only, what would happen if a combination was made between drones and the healthcare-system? Would these devices then actually be able to save lives?

What is it?

Zipline International has been experiencing with a plan to let drones deliver blood supplies across Rwanda. In Rwanda it is very common that hospital staff have to drive about 2 hours to get medicine or blood donation from the ‘closest’ hospital. On the road they also have to deal with unpassable roads due to the weather conditions and crappy-working cars. If it takes so long to get what a patient insistently needs, the patient may not be alive anymore by the time the medicine finally arrives. In July 2016 the drone service of Zipline will launch and from that day on it will make between 50 and 150 deliveries every single day.

It must be really expensive to bring this service to life; you might be thinking. At least that is what I thought at first. However, once the drones are installed the expenses are actually quite low. The electricity needed for one delivery will cost only 5 US cents, and the packaging of the delivery costs less than 1 US Dollar and is reusable. That seems to be a relatively inexpensive solution for a big problem.

Why is it cool?

Urbanisation is one of the biggest trends of the moment. People are moving to the cities which are starting to burst out. In 2025 70 % of all global citizens will be living in a city. These rising cities come with difficulties. One of these difficulties takes place in the health-care system. How can we take care of all these people?

In Zipline International I see a solution, not only for a country like Rwanda, but for big cities all around the world. It could even become a customer-service that delivers the medicine a patient need at his home. In my view the future would look a little something like this:

When you have certain health complains, you let a doctor check your condition via a microchip. From the hospital the doctor can diagnose what you are dealing with and prescribe you the appropriate medicine. Those will then be delivered at your house by a drone, while you don’t even have to get out of bed.