The defibrillator drone arrived and saved lives in three minutes

A seventy-one-year-old Swedish man has suffered a heart attack while shovelling snow. Thanks to a local startup called Everdrone, a defibrillator was on the scene in three minutes.

According to The Verge, two hundred thousand Swedish people can now be reached by Everdrone, which allows emergency services to send a lifesaving device to the address of the person who reported the emergency. The drone has been developed by the company in collaboration with the Karolinska Institute for Resuscitation Science, and a four-month test period preceded the live deployment. During this period, the ambulance service received fourteen calls for which drones could be dispatched; in twelve cases they took off, eleven were successful in reaching the scene and seven times they beat the ambulance to the scene. As the article reminds us, CPR should be started within ten minutes of a heart attack.

An important aspect of the Swedish story is that one of the witnesses to the incident was a doctor who was able to perform CPR until the drone arrived.

According to Everdrone, there are nearly 300,000 such cases in Europe every year, seventy percent of them in homes without defibrillators. The survival rate is only ten percent. In a press release, Everdrone says that the service will be available in other European countries in the future.

Source: theverge