The Medical Drones Team developed techniques and tools to transport medical cargo with unmanned aircraft. Dr. Tim Amukele and Jeff Street worked at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, Department of Pathology from 2014 to 2021.
Medical Cargo Transport via Industrial Multirotor
Demonstration of a medical cargo transport system compatible with industrial heavy-lift multirotors, shown here with the Freefly Alta X.
Kalangala Pilot Project
The Kalangala Islands are an archipelago with 84 separate islands, of which 64 are permanently inhabited. There are 17 Health Centers distributed over 9 islands. Travel between the islands is done by small boat, powered by outboard motors. Boat journeys are costly. For example, a journey to the furthest island requires 140 liters of fuel at a cost of approximately 2 USD/L.
This pilot project proposes to transport medical cargo to a subset of the islands via drones. Aircraft would be based at the Bufumira Health Center, and serve 4 surrounding islands.
Katima Pilot Project
The Namibia Institute of Pathology (NIP) operates a transport network that retrieves pathology samples from geographically isolated communities such as those in the Zambezi region. Due to the frequency of floods in the region, these communities are often cut off for months at a time.
Drone Transport of Chemistry and Hematology Laboratory Samples over Long Distances
Medical drone delivery records were set by Johns Hopkins researchers as they successfully transported human blood samples across 161 miles of desert. Throughout the three-hour flight, the on-board payload system maintained conditions, such as temperature, ensuring the samples were viable for diagnostic analysis upon landing.
Blood Products Transported By Drone Trips
The first study examining the effect of drone transport on blood products for transfusion. We describe approaches to maintain temperature control and blood component physical characteristics. Published in Transfusion.
Can Drones be Used for the Routine Transport of Blood and Sputum Laboratory Specimens?
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) could potentially be used to transport microbiological specimens. To examine the impact of UAVs on microbiological specimens, blood and sputum culture specimens were seeded with usual pathogens and flown in a UAV for 30 ± 2 min. Times to recovery, colony counts, morphologies, and matrix-assisted laser desorption ionization-time of flight mass spectrometry (MALDI-TOF MS)-based identifications of the flown and stationary specimens were similar for all microbes studied.
Can Drones be Used for Routine Transport of Laboratory Specimens?
Unmanned aircraft (drones) can potentially be used to routinely transport small goods such as clinical laboratory specimens for Chemistry, Hematology, and Coagulation analysis. To our knowledge, this is the first published study of the impact of drone transportation on laboratory test results.