Generalistic Assessments of the Potential of Medical Drones in Urban Environment

Abstract

At the current development stage, the lower airspace above urban areas is only used to a very limited extent. Recent developments in the drone industry are making this area more accessible. The leading use case for drone applications is currently seen in the medical sector. Individual evidence shows that the use of drones to transport medical personnel for first medical response brings significant improvements in terms of cost and response time.  Advantages in urban applications are seen as promising by some research projects, but this is not scientifically proven yet. This study deals with the simulation of transportation times of medical proposals by ambulance and drone in the metropolitan region of Stavanger and the comparison of transport times. The proposed methodology develops transferable results from concrete use-cases. By using a drone 80% of the expected operations can benefit from a reduction in transport time of up to 10 minutes with a variation of +/- 4 minutes through adjusted flight speeds due to weather conditions and variations in ambulance travel times due to different traffic volumes. The data set cleaned for the local special cases shows potential for a reduction of up to 20 minutes for the remaining operations, while the extracted individual cases even showing improvements of up to 60 minutes.