World First: Drone Delivers Defibrillator That Saves Man in Cardiac Arrest
Picture this: your medical first responder descends from the sky like a friendly, unmanned starship. Hovering over your door, it drops a device with recorded instructions to help a bystander jumpstart your heart that has stopped. This, after the 911 call but before the ambulance arrives.
This is exactly what happened on Dec. 9, 2021, when a 71-year-old man in Sweden suffered a cardiac arrest while shoveling snow. A passerby, seeing him collapse, called for an ambulance. In just over three minutes, a drone swooped overhead carrying an Automated External Defibrillator (AED). The patient was revived on the spot before the ambulance arrived to rush him to the hospital where he made a full recovery. The revolutionary technology saved his life.
In 2020, Sweden became the first country to deploy drones carrying AEDs to people in sudden cardiac arrest, when survival odds depend on getting CPR and an electric shock to the heart from a defibrillator within 5 minutes—nearly always before emergency responders arrive.
In the U.S. alone, more than 356,00 cardiac arrests occur outside of hospitals each year; 9 out of 10 of these people die. Plus, the risk of permanent brain injury increases after the first three minutes the heart stops beating. After nine minutes, damage to the brain and other organs is usually severe and irreversible.
“The fundamental technology can be applied to a lot of other emergency situations.”
Once the stuff of sci fi, the delivery of life-saving medical equipment by drone will be commonplace in the near future, experts say. The Swedish team is hailing their study as the first-ever proof of concept for using drones in emergency medicine. The drones arrived only two minutes before the ambulance in most cases but that’s significant during cardiac arrest when survival rates drop 10% every minute.
Since that 2020 pilot, the drones have been tweaked for better performance. They can travel faster and after dark today, and route planning has been optimized, says Mats Sällström, chief executive officer of Everdrone, the technical and development guru for the project, who is collaborating with researchers at the Karolinska Institutet and Sweden’s national emergency call center, SOS Alarm.
When an emergency call comes in, the operator determines if it’s a cardiac arrest. If so, the caller gets CPR instructions while an ambulance is summoned and a control center is notified automatically to dispatch a drone. If conditions allow, the drone flies to the scene via a GPS signal from the caller’s cell phone. Once dropped at the location, the AED beeps to signal its arrival. The AED talks the user through every step when it’s opened while the emergency operator offers support.
Public health officials have tried placing AEDs in public spaces like airports and shopping malls for quick access but the results have been disappointing. Poor usage rates of 2% to 3% have been attributed to bystanders not knowing where they are, not wanting to leave victims, or the site being closed when needed.
Some people fear they could harm the victim or won’t know how to use the AED but not to worry, says Wayne Rosamond, a professor of epidemiology at the University of North Carolina Gillings School of Global Public Health, who studies AED drones. “[The device] won’t shock someone unless they need to be shocked,” he says.
The AED instructions are foolproof, echoes Timothy Chan, professor of engineering at the University of Toronto, who has been building optimization models to design drone networks in Ontario, Canada. All the same, he says, community education will be essential for success. “People have more awareness about drones than AEDs,” he’s found.
Rosamond and Chan are among scientists around the world inspired by Sweden to do their own modeling, simulation and feasibility studies on drone-delivered AEDs.
“Scandinavia is way ahead of us,” notes Rosamond. “There is a tremendous amount of regulatory control over flying drones in the U.S.” In addition to Federal Aviation Administration restrictions, medical drones in the U.S. must comply with HIPAA laws surrounding confidentiality and security of patient information.
To date, Sweden has expanded drone operations and home bases around the country and throughout Europe. Since April 2021, the team has deployed 1-4 drones per week, says Sällström.
Certain weather conditions remain an obstacle. The drones cannot be dispatched safely in rain, snow and heavy wind. Close, heavily populated neighborhoods with high-rise buildings also present challenges.
“Semi-urban areas with residential low-rise [1-5 stories] buildings are the sweet spot for our operations,” Sällström says. “However, as the system matures, we will pursue operations in practically all-weather conditions and also in densely populated areas.” The team is also trying to improve drone speed and battery life to enable flights to rural and remote areas in the future.
Chan predicts that delivering AEDs via drone will be a regular occurrence in five years. In addition, he says, “The fundamental technology can be applied to a lot of other emergency situations.”
Drones could carry medications for anaphylactic shock and opioid overdose, or bring tourniquets and bandages to trauma victims, Chan suggests. Other researchers are looking at the delivery of glucose for low blood sugar emergencies and the transport of organs for transplant.
The sky is no longer the limit.
Therapies for Healthy Aging with Dr. Alexandra Bause
My guest today is Dr. Alexandra Bause, a biologist who has dedicated her career to advancing health, medicine and healthier human lifespans. Dr. Bause co-founded a company called Apollo Health Ventures in 2017. Currently a venture partner at Apollo, she's immersed in the discoveries underway in Apollo’s Venture Lab while the company focuses on assembling a team of investors to support progress. Dr. Bause and Apollo Health Ventures say that biotech is at “an inflection point” and is set to become a driver of important change and economic value.
Previously, Dr. Bause worked at the Boston Consulting Group in its healthcare practice specializing in biopharma strategy, among other priorities
She did her PhD studies at Harvard Medical School focusing on molecular mechanisms that contribute to cellular aging, and she’s also a trained pharmacist
In the episode, we talk about the present and future of therapeutics that could increase people’s spans of health, the benefits of certain lifestyle practice, the best use of electronic wearables for these purposes, and much more.
Dr. Bause is at the forefront of developing interventions that target the aging process with the aim of ensuring that all of us can have healthier, more productive lifespans.
This man spent over 70 years in an iron lung. What he was able to accomplish is amazing.
It’s a sight we don’t normally see these days: A man lying prone in a big, metal tube with his head sticking out of one end. But it wasn’t so long ago that this sight was unfortunately much more common.
In the first half of the 20th century, tens of thousands of people each year were infected by polio—a highly contagious virus that attacks nerves in the spinal cord and brainstem. Many people survived polio, but a small percentage of people who did were left permanently paralyzed from the virus, requiring support to help them breathe. This support, known as an “iron lung,” manually pulled oxygen in and out of a person’s lungs by changing the pressure inside the machine.
Paul Alexander was one of several thousand who were infected and paralyzed by polio in 1952. That year, a polio epidemic swept the United States, forcing businesses to close and polio wards in hospitals all over the country to fill up with sick children. When Paul caught polio in the summer of 1952, doctors urged his parents to let him rest and recover at home, since the hospital in his home suburb of Dallas, Texas was already overrun with polio patients.
Paul rested in bed for a few days with aching limbs and a fever. But his condition quickly got worse. Within a week, Paul could no longer speak or swallow, and his parents rushed him to the local hospital where the doctors performed an emergency procedure to help him breathe. Paul woke from the surgery three days later, and found himself unable to move and lying inside an iron lung in the polio ward, surrounded by rows of other paralyzed children.
Hospitals were commonly filled with polio patients who had been paralyzed by the virus before a vaccine became widely available in 1955. Associated Press
Paul struggled inside the polio ward for the next 18 months, bored and restless and needing to hold his breath when the nurses opened the iron lung to help him bathe. The doctors on the ward frequently told his parents that Paul was going to die.But against all odds, Paul lived. And with help from a physical therapist, Paul was able to thrive—sometimes for small periods outside the iron lung.
The way Paul did this was to practice glossopharyngeal breathing (or as Paul called it, “frog breathing”), where he would trap air in his mouth and force it down his throat and into his lungs by flattening his tongue. This breathing technique, taught to him by his physical therapist, would allow Paul to leave the iron lung for increasing periods of time.
With help from his iron lung (and for small periods of time without it), Paul managed to live a full, happy, and sometimes record-breaking life. At 21, Paul became the first person in Dallas, Texas to graduate high school without attending class in person, owing his success to memorization rather than taking notes. After high school, Paul received a scholarship to Southern Methodist University and pursued his dream of becoming a trial lawyer and successfully represented clients in court.
Paul Alexander, pictured here in his early 20s, mastered a type of breathing technique that allowed him to spend short amounts of time outside his iron lung. Paul Alexander
Paul practiced law in North Texas for more than 30 years, using a modified wheelchair that held his body upright. During his career, Paul even represented members of the biker gang Hells Angels—and became so close with them he was named an honorary member.Throughout his long life, Paul was also able to fly on a plane, visit the beach, adopt a dog, fall in love, and write a memoir using a plastic stick to tap out a draft on a keyboard. In recent years, Paul joined TikTok and became a viral sensation with more than 330,000 followers. In one of his first videos, Paul advocated for vaccination and warned against another polio epidemic.
Paul was reportedly hospitalized with COVID-19 at the end of February and died on March 11th, 2024. He currently holds the Guiness World Record for longest survival inside an iron lung—71 years.
Polio thankfully no longer circulates in the United States, or in most of the world, thanks to vaccines. But Paul continues to serve as a reminder of the importance of vaccination—and the power of the human spirit.
““I’ve got some big dreams. I’m not going to accept from anybody their limitations,” he said in a 2022 interview with CNN. “My life is incredible.”