Study: Impact of Drone Delivery of AEDs
Contact
Connecting someone with a defibrillator after out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA) is crucial. The possibility of survival drops significantly after 5 minutes.
Dr. Monique Starks, associate professor in the Department of Medicine at the Duke University School of Medicine, is the author of a newly published study that modeled the potential impact drone delivery of AEDs might have on response times for OHCA. The study, which included historical OHCAs between 013-2019 from 48 counties in North Carolina, found that a network of drones combined with first responders universally having AEDs, could increase the percent of OHCAs with a response time of less than five minutes from 16% to 56.3% with a median time of 4.8 minutes compared with historical response time of 8.0 minutes.
The results were published in the journal JACC: Advances https://authors.elsevier.com/sd/article/S2772-963X(24)00223-0