Models for Drone Delivery of Medications and Other Healthcare Items (original) (raw)

Drone Delivery Models for Healthcare

Proceedings of the 50th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (2017), 2017

Just as the mobile phone allowed developing countries to leapfrog technology in personal communication, the delivery drone has the potential to have the same effect on traditional transportation infrastructure. Inaccessible roads no longer will prevent delivery of blood, medications or other healthcare items. This paper reviews the current status of innovative drone delivery with a particular emphasis on healthcare. The leading companies in this field and their different strategies are studied. Further we review the latest decision models that facilitate management decision making for operating a drone fleet. Our contribution in this paper of two new models associated with the design of a drone healthcare delivery network will facilitate more timely, efficient and economical drone healthcare delivery to potentially save lives.

Medical Drone Delivery in Developing Countries

Embedded Selforganising Systems, 2018

Developing countries often have difficulties in the field of medicine, and many of these problems do not relate to missing knowledge but on the transportation possibilities to bring patient, doctor and the necessary medical supplies together. In a research study for the country of Mongolia the advantages of a drone delivery system are shown and the unique challenges such as temperature, elevation and range are discussed to choose a suitable system design for countries with enormous size and low population. Airplane like drones with their wider distances seem to be the most promising solution to connect rural areas to the medical logistics network.

Design of a Service for Hospital Internal Transport of Urgent Pharmaceuticals via Drones

Drones

The internal transport of medical goods in a hospital heavily relies on human resources that carry the materials on foot. Such mode of transport may be affected by inefficiencies, e.g., due to bottlenecks, and other logistic challenges. Thus, it may benefit from the use of unmanned aircraft systems in several aspects. Such a scenario introduces specific criticalities for healthcare organizations in densely populated areas and below congested airspace, such as the Milan metropolitan area. The authors applied a co-creation methodology to design a highly automated drone service for the delivery of pharmaceuticals at San Raffaele Hospital, Milan, Italy. The needs of the main users were identified by means of semi-structured interviews and visualization material. Based on those outcomes, a drone service was designed and validated with the main users. It emerged that the main gain point of such a service would be increasing hospital logistics efficiency. The risks tied to the operations (...

IoT Drone Technology Integration in Medical Logistics Delivery

Science Journal of Public Health, 2022

Drone technology has linked up several opportunities to enable direct connection with the medical consumable donors to receive request through mobile phone communication and deliver medical consumables via Drone device. The recent development in autonomous air navigation and implementation of Drones into mainstream geographical ecosystem have been recognized for adoption in healthcare emergency responses. At the center of the innovation is the Internet of Things (IoT) technology which had necessitated advanced mission specification for Drones to operate beyond visually line of sight (BVLOS) in responding to classified healthcare assignments. The use of Drones in the healthcare management, welfare support, emergency responses and health risk management was investigated in the selected country of the Central East Africa (Rwanda). The research discovered a system of dynamic connection between the tiers of governments in active partnership with the private sector initiative to exploit Drone technology innovation to improve healthcare service delivery up to the grass root level with an outstanding productivity. The article evaluated Africa's involvement in the society healthcare extreme automation using Drone technology capabilities and deliberated on the possibilities and benefits for implementation and adoption into the national healthcare sector in Nigeria. The paper concluded that future implementation of the research will accomplish the digital health demands of Nigeria government, public and private sector health maintenance to guarantee sustainable healthcare investment and effective healthcare service delivery.

Intricacies of medical drones in healthcare delivery: Implications for Africa

Technology in Society, 2021

Unmanned aerial vehicles, also known as drones, can play a critical role in delivering health care. In this paper, we reviewed the literature to ascertain (1) the various medical supplies delivered by drones, (2) the challenges to the successful use of medical drones and (3) the potential benefits of medical drones. Implications for the African context is then provided. In achieving this objective, we employed a systematic literature review methodology and defined search strings, searched for relevant literature from PubMed, Scopus and Web of Science databases following a review protocol. The snowball technique was similarly used to search for other papers as well. A total of 17 out of 69 papers were included in the review after screening and applying a quality appraisal criterion. The results indicate that blood, AEDs, drugs, vaccines, and laboratory test samples etc were identified as part of the medical supplies aerially delivered by drones. Regulations, cost, misuse (evasion of people's privacy) and psychological effect on people who experienced drones used for bombing are part of the challenges that could result from using the technology for delivery of medical supplies. The benefits derived from drones range from reducing response times during health emergencies thus helping to save more lives, to being environmentally friendly as the CO 2 emissions levels are lower than conventional delivery by trucks and cars. In conclusion, drone technology has opened a new phase for the health sector and to sustain this technological innovation in Africa, there is the need for inclusive innovation to make drones safer and acceptable. This could be achieved by developing the needed policy framework with the regulators, providing other health resources to complement the use of drones, embarking on sensitizations on the usefulness of drones through cultural underpinnings of rural communities about drones and training the needed health personnel to handle dispatches of medical supplies with drones.

Do drones have a realistic place in a pandemic fight for delivering medical supplies in healthcare systems problems?

Chinese Journal of Aeronautics, 2021

The advancement of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) technology in terms of industrial processes and communication and networking technologies has led to an increase in their use in civil, business, and social applications. Global rules in most countries had previously limited the use of drones to military applications due to their deployment in the open air, drones are likely to be lost, destroyed, or physically hijacked. However, more recently, the presence of COVID-19 has forced the world to present new implementing measures which will also widen the use of drones in civil and commercial and social applications, especially now in the delivery of medicines for medical home care. In the period of required public isolation as a consequence of the SARS-COV-2 pandemic, this knowledge has become one of the principal partners in the fight against the coronavirus. This paper offers a summary of the medical drone manufacturing, with a specific emphasis on its approval by the pharmaceutical sector to solve logistical problems in healthcare during times of sensitive need. We also discuss the numerous challenges to be met in the integration of drones to save our lives and suggest future research directions. The question that arises for this problem, how to optimize delivery medical supplies times in-home health care made up of drones? We conducted a synthesis literature review devoted to the use of UAVs in healthcare with their different aspects. A total of different research made are given to describe the role of UAV in Home healthcare with the presence of SARS-COV-2. We conclude that the drones will be able to optimize the way of eliminating contamination with a very high percentage (through the reduction of human contact) with the increase of the flexibility of the flight (reaching the less accessible regions every hour of the day).

Medicine Delivery Drone

International Journal of Engineering Research and, 2020

In this study we are implementing a medicine drone delivery system using CC3D flight controller which is configured using Open pilot Ground Control Station software. The drone is optimized to deliver the medicine in rural areas, its location can be tracked using GPS together with the Blynk software. The location tracker have been carried out using NodeMCU. This drone can be of great use in certain regions where the geographical terrain is uneven and not fit for proper transportation, also in the areas where there is still lack of proper transportation services available.

Drones for Medical Delivery Considering Different Demands Classes: A Markov Decision Process Approach for Managing Health Centers Dispatching Medical Products

ArXiv, 2021

We consider the problem of optimizing the distribution operations of a hub using drones to deliver medical supplies to different geographic regions. Drones are an innovative method with many benefits including low-contact delivery thereby reducing the spread of pandemic and vaccine-preventable diseases. While we focus on medical supply delivery for this work, it is applicable to drone delivery for many other applications, including food, postal items, and e-commerce delivery. In this paper, our goal is to address drone delivery challenges by optimizing the distribution operations at a drone hub that dispatch drones to different geographic locations generating stochastic demands for medical supplies. By considering different geographic locations, we consider different classes of demand that require different flight ranges, which is directly related to the amount of charge held in a drone battery. We classify the stochastic demands based on their distance from the drone hub, use a Mar...

Drone: The Solution to Delivery Problems

International Journal for Research in Applied Science and Engineering Technology, 2021

This proposed drone focuses on providing essential medical aids in rural or hilly regions where it is difficult to reach fast. This drone can be used during natural calamities like earthquake, flood and landslide. It will help to deliver medical supplies and lab samples. Moreover, blood samples will also become unusable after travelling long distances from hilly areas to the laboratories. It can be overcome by using this drone. It can give the real time video of the location. In India, due to heavy traffic the emergency need of blood and medicines are delayed, but this problem can be overcome by our drone. This drone can automatically travel the given path without any control from user. It can be also controlled manually during some obstacles or dangers at any time.

Importance of Drones in Healthcare Delivery Amid a Pandemic: Current and Generation Next Application

2021

LICENSE: This work by Open Journals Nigeria is licensed and published under the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0 International License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided this article is duly cited. COPYRIGHT: The Author(s) completely retain the copyright of this published article. OPEN ACCESS: The Author(s) approves that this article remains permanently online in the open access (OA) mode. QA: This Article is published in line with “COPE (Committee on Publication Ethics) and PIE (Publication Integrity & Ethics)”. ABSTRACT