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Sweden’s need to react more quickly to sudden out-of-hospital cardiac arrests may have given rise to the world’s first drone killer app.

According to Andreas Claesson, chair of the Swedish Resuscitation Council, the country’s low cardiac arrest survival rate (10%) is a by-product of several factors – mainly response times and early access to onsite automated external defibrillators (AEDs).  

“It takes too long for emergency crews to get to an incident site – and most often there are no accessible AEDs,” said Claesson. “In about 70% of the cases, the incident site is the patient’s home.

“We ran simulations and found that we can get a drone to most homes ahead of an ambulance – with a potential life-saving impact. Our hypothesis is that by getting AEDs to the site two minutes earlier, on average, we could make a big improvement to the survival rate.” 

So Claesson contacted Everdrone, a Swedish company that already had a multi-purpose drone platform that could be adapted to different use cases. After discussions with Claesson, Everdrone developed a first responder application to deliver AEDs to incident sites.

Rather than make their own drones, Everdrone buys standard systems off the shelf and adds sensors, a navigation device, cameras, connectivity components, an on-board computer and a parachute safety system. These are just some of the extra components that make the drones intelligent, autonomous and safe.

Everdrone’s current generation of systems can reach a radius of 6km and operate in wind speeds of up to 14m per second, including gusts. For the time being, they do not operate in rain, but are expected to be able to in about 12 months’ time.