The Future of Emergency Services are Selfdriving Ambulances Supported by Drones

Source: Pixabay

With the rise of unmanned vehicles many jobs like truck and taxidriver will become obselete. Ambulance services are a demanding party for more automation. Ambulance services in developed countries are being stretched to the limit of their capacity due to the ageing population. It is a worrying problem for the near future.

There are already vehicles capable of driving autonomously so several governments try to solve the shortage of manpower with unmanned vehicles. Once implemented, manned ambulances will be able to fully focus on patients with a life or death situation. A typical situation would be that emergency services send out unmanned ambulances on the spot, once arrived the unmanned ambulances will take the role of a medical taxi and bring the patients with non-life threathing situations to the hospital. This way pressure on emergency services would be releaved.

Source: Pexels

Drones Play Their Part

Besides delivering packages, or patrolling the skies for the military, drones can also be applied for medical purposes. Drones will come in handy for delivering medical devices on remote locations and most importantly, in time ! In Africa a similar project has already been started up, where drones deliver blood and medication to unreachable area's. Drones can also be used in industrialized countries. If a doctor needs to treat a patient within a remote area and doesn't have the required tools at hand, he can always call in a drone to fly over with a medical kit. Or what about delivering medical necessities with drones long before the emergency services arrive ? Transport of medication, blood and specialized tools between hospitals by drones will be common in the near future.

Map of Manhattan with its hospitals, it is not unthinkable that within a few decades a swarm of drones will continuously deliver packages between hospitals.

Emergency Predictions

For several years now, police forces around the world use a sophisticated algorithm to predict in which parts of a city crimminal offenses are most likely to happen. At the hand of this data police officers are send on patrol more often these hotspots than somewhere else. A similar system can predict which places will be more emergency sensitive than others for ambulance services.

Source: Pixabay

Software based on this algorithm collects data from the manned and umanned ambulance rides, it holds into account particular situations like weather forecasts, concerts or protests. With this system unmanned ambulances can stay on standby in these high-risk area's waiting till an emergency occurs. Over time the software will become more refined because of the gathered data, eventually it will be able to predict when and where ambulances will have to be send out.

These new methods may seem far-fetched, but within a few decades they could change the way we receive medical treatements. How long this will take depends on how fast health care services will invest in this technology. These new technologies may offer a variety of solutions to problems such as the rising demand of ambulance services. Even if it makes ambulance rides more effecient and safer, it will take a while before the public gets used to self-driving ambulances.

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