Written by: Ewan Strydom
Everdrone, is taking the world by “first response” storm!
Over the past few years, we have seen how drones have evolved. Now I am talking about the type of drones we’re are well familiar with, from the small pocket-sized drones, that you can whip out and take a ‘sick’ selfie of you and your mates on Camps Bay beach, to the more professional drones. These are used by television crews to make your favourite movie scenes, whizzing through buildings and tight spaces, or filming an epic car chase scene. Those are just two of the many MANY uses of drones or Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) today.
However, I want to focus on drones that can literally save lives, enter, like Everdrone, a first response like you’ve never seen it before. Sweden is taking the lead in developing a fleet of drones that could change the way we get to people in urgent medical need across the globe a whole lot faster.
Everdrone means business with their drones to make their mission of saving lives a monumental success, and they have recently proved that they can do it.
The company has put tremendous research and development into their first response drones, to date, they have done almost 2.4 million simulated flights and conducted almost 16500 autonomous flights to make sure that everything goes exactly as it should, and it paid off recently when an elderly mans’ life was saved by the efficiency and speed of their medical drones.
According to Theunis Janse van Rensburg of Bandwidth Blog, an elderly man in his 70s was shovelling snow when he started experiencing a heart attack. Now a lot of elderly people in Sweden carry a device with an alert button on their person, and should something go wrong, they can press it and immediate family or nominated individuals and doctors around them are instantly notified, as well as Everdrone. Everdrone managed to get to the man’s house in an astonishing 3 minutes with a defibrillator on board, as opposed to the 10, 15, 20 minutes it would take an ambulance. A doctor in the area was able to intercept the drone at the man’s house and saved his life. How amazing!
I know, it sounds futuristic, but this was the first time that a drone has been called to action and a live was saved! The Everdrone carries all the basic medical equipment and medicines for the most common crises, like heart attacks, diabetes, severe allergies etc. With the help of people close to the person in need, their lives can be saved.
How is this for an interesting fact about drones?
According to IWM, The very FIRST pilotless ‘drones’ were actually developed during the first world war by the USA and Britain.
Britain had their best of the best develop what they called their “Arial Target”, which essentially was a small radio-controlled aircraft that they tested for the first time in 1917. And then you have the USA that came up with what they titled the “Kettering Bug”, a kind of aerial torpedo that took to the sky for the first time in 1918. Both these inventions actually showed a lot of promise, however, neither was actually used during the war.
So needless to say that drones have been very long in the making, and the applications for their uses are vast in the present day and age.
I love the work done by Everdrone because if I think of things like severe traffic jams or remote areas, it can take an ambulance what could feel like a lifetime to get to the scene.
I am excited to see where this goes, and how it develops further, and who knows, we might see it starting to roll out as the norm in the near future!
Also read : Hot Topics at CES 2022
