Last month in Sweden, an elderly man experienced a cardiac arrest while shoveling snow. Today, this man is still alive thanks in large part to Everdrone’s Emergency Medical Aerial Delivery (EMADE) service, a dispatch service that uses drones to fly in defibrillators.
An individual experiencing cardiac arrest has only 10 minutes to get help in order to survive—the EMADE service gives people a chance by allowing emergency dispatchers to send defibrillators to their location as soon as a call is made. This kicks off the lifesaving process way before an ambulance even arrives on the scene.
According to Everdrone, approximately 275,000 patients in Europe suffer from cardiac arrest each year, and around 70 percent of them happen within a private home that is not equipped with a defibrillator. The survival rate for cardiac arrest is only about 10 percent.
The 71-year-old man was the first recipient of this service, which only took three minutes to deliver the defibrillator to his home. Luckily, a bystander who was also coincidentally a doctor on his way to work used the device on the patient before resuscitating him with CPR.
“This is an excellent real-world example of how Everdrone’s cutting edge drone technology, fully integrated with emergency dispatch, can minimize the time for access to life-saving… equipment,” said Everdrone CEO Mats Sӓllstrӧm.
For now, the EMADE service is available to 200,000 Swedish residents but the company has plans to expand to more locations within the country and across Europe in the near future.
