AeroMed Lab: Racing the Clock to Save Lives with Autonomous Blood Drones

When a soldier is wounded on a battlefield, every minute counts. Field medics can try to minimize the bleeding, but due to the nature of combat they lack necessary equipment and the sanitized environment required for surgery. Without evacuation to a proper medical facility, many patients will simply bleed to death, sometimes over the course of several hours.

Fatal outcomes have become more common as improved anti-air defense systems can delay helicopter evacuations for extended periods of time. If ambulances cannot reliably navigate the war-torn infrastructure, then the wounded must be carried away on stretchers. Each of these delays in care can prove fatal. At the moment of injury a clock began ticking, and when time runs out a life will be lost.

At the AeroMed Lab, we improve survivability by increasing the time an individual has to receive medical care. By leveraging recent improvements in artificial intelligence, lighter batteries, and blood storage technology, we can innovate autonomous drones with great range and speed. Such drones are small and nimble enough to slip through the battlefield and deliver bags of whole blood directly to the wounded. With simple blood transfusions, minutes of life can be extend to hours, and hours of life can potentially be extended by days.

The gravity of this task is well understood by our laboratory, as each delivery we make is the most important mission of our life. Nothing less than excellence will suffice.