The use of these aircraft is proving invaluable, for example in reaching the inhabitants of some islands and overcoming other health problems. Several problems remain
Nine out of ten Italians believe that a medical material delivery service (drugs, devices, organs, blood) is useful, carried out with the use of drones. what emerges from the latest research Drones: between Tradition and Innovation of the Drones Observatory of the School of Management of the Politecnico di Milano. The same survey shows that the approval drops to 80 percent when it comes to freight transport with drones to reduce city traffic (43%) o improve the services offered to citizens and reduce delivery times (both 36%).
Social acceptance
Our data confirms that the object of transport significantly affects the social acceptance of technology. The share of those who claim to consider a service for transporting medical supplies useful is 11 percentage points higher than those who consider a service for transporting goods of another nature to be useful. The chance to save lives with faster and more efficient transport in fact, it leads citizens to consider a service of this type more important, he stresses Paola Olivares, director of the Drones Observatory. Is exactly social acceptance It has long been identified as one of the major criticisms of a transport service with drones, together with the lack of a precise regulatory framework and the technological limitations associated with the ability to transport heavy loads. The survey also highlighted how it exists even less enthusiasm for the transport of people: only 57% of the population sees its usefulness. 34% of respondents say they are more likely to use a self-driving car than an unmanned drone, which would be the first choice for only 7%. One in 4 Italians consider the use of the two vehicles to be indifferent, while the remaining 35% do not feel safe in using either of them.
Valuable commodity
In short, if on the one hand it is still early for driverless ambulances (there are prototypes), the medicine that comes from the sky seems to have earned points. Drones can already transport medicines, biological samples and other materials in the healthcare sector, reducing the time required to transfer them by land, where you always have to deal with traffic, and being able to reach places that are not well connected with ease and at low cost. And it is no coincidence that the National Strategic Plan 2021-2030 for the development of ENAC’s advanced air mobility (National Civil Aviation Authority) identifies the transport of biomedical material as one of the four main applications on which to focus.
Where they are most common
The application cases surveyed worldwide by the Drones Observatory are 205 between 2019 and 2021, of which 93% concerns the transport of goods by drones and the remaining 7% the transport of people. The nation with the highest number is the United States with 57 applications, followed by Italy which has 21Australia with 9 and China with 8. In the transport of goods with drones soo 190 cases worldwide: 61 concern the delivery of medical material, 33 deal with food, 23 with postal parcels, while only 4 deal with heavy loads. The main types of transport are last-mile deliveries of small packages to individual customers (36%), followed by deliveries to healthcare facilities (18%). Less common is the transport of heavy loads.
Problems and opportunities
As he writes Bertalan Meskdirector of the Medical Futurist Institute in Budapest, there is still a long list of problems to be solved before drones can become part of our life. This is true, but the road has now been mapped out. In Italy, Enac has so far authorized only a few experiments which simulated the drone transport of biological sanitary material, in VLOS (Visual Line of Sight) and BVLOS (Beyond Visual of Sight, flight beyond the line of sight) operations. However, there is no lack of requests. To Venice, Aulss 3 Serenissima has launched an experimental program for the delivery of drugs to chronic patients residing in the Venetian islands of Sant’Erasmo and Vignole, where there are no pharmacies. Reduce transport times and costs with the use of drones in the transfer of biological organs and materials, instead of what is proposed the Indoor project in Turin (usING Drones for Organ Transplantation promoted by the DOT Foundation (Organ Donation and Transplantation), in collaboration with the Polytechnic of the City of Health and the University. Corus-Xuam European project, the Aerospace Technological District of Brindisi instead, it will experiment with the urgent transport of vaccines by drones between the Grottaglie airport and the Manduria hospital (Taranto).
April 5, 2022 (change April 5, 2022 | 09:47)
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