The Promising Future of Drones in Prehospital Medical Care and its Application to Battlefield Medicine

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), commonly referred to as drones, have been made widely available in recent years leading to an exponential growth in their roles and applications. The rapidly developing field of medical drones is on the verge of revolutionizing pre-hospital medicine enabling advanced healthcare delivery to once-inaccessible patients. The aim of this review is to clarify the basic technical properties of currently available medical drones and review recent advances and their usefulness in military and civilian healthcare missions. A thorough search was conducted using conventional medical literature databases and non-medical popular search engines. The results indicate increasingly rapid incorporation of UAVs into search and rescue missions, telemedicine assignments, medical supply routes, public health surveillance and disaster management. Medical drones appear to be of great benefit for improving survivability of deployed forces on and off the battlefield. The emerging aerial medical delivery systems appear to provide particularly promising solutions for bridging some of the many serious gaps between third world healthcare systems and their western counterparts and between major metropolitan centers and distant rural communities. The global nature of drone-based health-care delivery needs points to a need for an international effort between collaborating civilian and military medical forces in order to harness the currently available resources and novel emerging technologies for broader life-saving capabilities. Study type: Review label of evidence: V Conflict of interest statement: The Authors do not have any conflict of interest. Corresponding Author: Dean Nachman, MD. The Military Track of Medicine, Faculty of Medicine, the Hebrew University, Hebrew University, Hadassah Campus, Jerusalem P.O.B 12272, Israel 91120; Email: Dean@hadassah.org.il; Phone: 972-50-2217665 Meeting: This article was motivated by the poster presentation entitled “A Case Study On-Demand Medical Supply Glider” by Nachman et al. presented in the 2016 MHSRS conference, Florida. © 2019 Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, Inc.

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