Devices & Diagnostics, Telemedicine

In emergencies, drones can help deliver medical supplies and … even Google Glass

Medical drones can not only deliver vital medical supplies but also provide devices like the Google Glass through a HIPAA-compliant platform to help physicians communicate with victims on the ground.

hirodrones

For those in Bolton, Mississippi, looking up at the sky over John Bell Williams Airport on Tuesday afternoon, what they saw — two drones flying — could represent the future of disaster medicine.

This was meant to be a simulated mass casualty scenario and the drones carried kits of medical supplies to help “victims” said Dr. Italo Subbarao, senior associate dean at the William Carey University College of Osteopathic Medicine (WCUCOM) in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, in a phone interview on Monday. 

The purpose of the demonstration was to put the capabilities of the Telemedical Drone Project — known as HiRO (Health Integrated Rescue Operations) for short— on display. The concept was was co-developed by Subbarao and Guy Cooper Jr., a fourth-year medical student at WCUCOM.

The kits incorporated head-mounted optical device in addition to medical supplies, according to Subbarao.

The point?

To allow physicians to communicate remotely to kit recipients so that, if the need arises, people without medical training can be walked through the critical, initial steps of treating victims of gunshot wounds or disasters such as tornadoes and hurricanes.

Subbarao and Cooper began working on HiRO in 2013 shortly after an EF-4 tornado ripped through Hattiesburg in February 2013. Typically after a natural disaster, emergency crews work quickly to reestablish communications—cell service specifically—in order to coordinate rescue efforts on the ground. But sometimes physical barriers of destroyed homes, roads, and downed trees make it difficult or impossible for ground crews to reach victims. Subbarao and Cooper thought drones were the ideal candidate for navigating this sort of disaster challenge.

“Why can’t we use drone technology and combine that with portable medical technology?” Subbarao recalled. 

Over two years the pair worked with a variety of partners, including experts from the drone aviation program at nearby Hinds Community College, to build and test two prototype drones each capable of flying about 35 miles per hour, staying airborne for roughly 30 minutes, and carrying 20-pound payloads of medical supplies. The kits the drones carried Tuesday afternoon were stocked with tourniquets and hemostatic bandages. One of the kits, a mass casualty medical package, contained enough supplies to treat at least 100 injuries and up to 20 people, Subbarao said.

While those are valuable to victims, Subbarao and Cooper thought the real value would be in communications to the outside world. That’s where the Google Glass comes in. Using a combination of third-party, proprietary software and software Subbarao and Cooper developed, the “critical injury” kit that integrates an encrypted communication stream that allows a physician or nurse in a hospital or other medical facility to talk in real-time to victims on the ground.

Using an app called the HiRO-remote guidance system, a physician is able to activate background lights embedded in the kit to guide bystanders or victims in emergency situations to the supplies they need to treat specific injuries. Google Glass allows medical personnel to see what the people at the scene are seeing, and the added voice communication allows them to guide bystanders at the scene through basic medical treatment to stabilize victims until emergency personnel can arrive and take over.

“This is about empowering someone in a life-threatening situation,” said Subbarao, who’s a board-certified osteopathic emergency physician and expert in disaster medicine.

The drone and communication technology that was demonstrated is satellite-enabled, which means it can still work if cellular networks are down.

It’s with an eye to this type of communications disruption that companies like Verizon are also testing disaster-response drones. The thinking is that an aerial response, using small drones weighing less than 55 pounds, can augment any emergency response from the ground.

Subbarao has provided field and technical support during a number of large-scale disasters, including Hurricane Katrina and the 2008 Mumbai terrorist shooting attacks in India. As part of this work, he said he’s worked with a variety of technologies, including how Twitter is used by victims to communicate with emergency personnel. But in locations where physical infrastructure was damaged or impassable, he said the idea of mobile medicine kept coming back to him.

“Topics of telemedicine were things we were always looking at,” he said. “The power of telemedicine today is the ability for it to be mobile, to be user-friendly, to be cheap, and that led us to building the first drone prototype we had.”

Such innovation notwithstanding, it might take a while to see these devices being routinely used to aide disaster recovery.

“The biggest hindrance to getting this technology in emergency response situations is FAA regulations,” Subbarao declared.

The Federal Aviation Administration requires drones to be flown within an operator’s line of sight. But in an emergency situation, line-of-sight operations will very likely be an impossibility.

It’s for that reason that Tuesday’s demonstration was done in front of an audience of federal government personnel. Per the news release announcing the demo, representatives from the Department of Homeland Security, the FAA, and the United Nations attended Tuesday’s demonstration.

“We want to showcase this as a very usable technology,” Subbarao said, “so folks can become familiar with it.”

Photo: American Osteopathic Association

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