The life-saving drone able to quickly deliver defibrillators in the event of sudden cardiac arrest, but also blood products, drugs, surgical kits in various emergency situations will take off in mid-September, in Campania, for the first official test. and organs to be transplanted. This was announced to Adnkronos Salute by Mario Balzanelli, national president of Sis118 and creator and leader of the Seuam (Sanitary Urban Air Mobility) project. A project which, he stresses, “centers on the absolute need to buy time, because time is the determining variable which, in an emergency, makes the difference between life and death”.
After the first test, in mid-October in Rome there will be “the official presentation, with the first flight of Apteron – as the revolutionary drone is called – in a scenario of simulated sudden cardiac arrest. The defibrillator carried by the drone will arrive within 3 minutes, a rescue revolution “, explains Balzanelli, who yesterday received from the aerospace consortium Caltec of Vallata (Avellino), technical partner of the Seuam project, the communication signed by the sole administrator, Carlo Villani Aquilino, on the operating times of the project. After the ‘roll out’ (i.e. the first take-off with movement in a controlled area) of Apteron and the official presentation, the tests will be held, with increasing levels of technical difficulty, in the Municipalities that have joined the experimentation: Taranto, Altomonte ( Calabria), Santa Lucia di Serino and Massa di Somma (Campania). “Seuam however remains open to all other Municipalities who wish to join it”, adds Balzanelli.
In autumn, therefore, the project, presented for the first time in October 2021, takes off and goes into the operational phase. “We have foreseen 3 different levels of difficulty. The first is the one in which the drone arrives easily, for example in a square; the second is in a medium-large street; the third is represented by places that are very difficult to reach, in case of emergency, with the means traditionally used: an alley, a very bumpy area like a ravine. In each municipality, therefore, we will test the drone in scenarios with increasing levels of difficulty “. The goal is to save lives by acting quickly.
The experimentation project foresees, in fact, the sending of hyper-fast drones by the 118 operating centers, remotely controlled by specialized operators, in situations of high clinical criticality, such as cardiac arrest, haemorrhagic shock, severe intoxications.
“Let’s imagine the scenario of a road accident – says Balzanelli – A 118 auto-doctor arrives and finds a person in hemorrhagic shock, who therefore needs a transfusion. The 118 operations center immediately takes off the drone territorially closest to the area of the ‘accident, which arrives at supersonic speed bringing to the doctor the blood products for the transfusion: this means bringing the traumatized person alive to the operating room. Or again, let’s think of a cardiac arrest on a ship where there is no defibrillator: the central operative starts Apteron which, like a missile, carries the defibrillator on board. Otherwise the person would be doomed “.
“Speed - underlines the expert – is the biological determinant that makes the difference between life and death. If you do not contract the times of rescue, drastically reducing them, you are defeated because death is a time-dependent process. . The goal – he remarks – is to save potentially avoidable deaths “.
Reducing the time is the goal of using the drone which, in fact, “must be activated when there is a reasonable probability that it will arrive much earlier than the normal emergency vehicles used – specifies Balzanelli – We will carry out comparative tests, putting the drone or a self-medicates in competition to evaluate who arrives first in the various emergency scenarios. We must launch a model that works, it makes no sense to launch a novelty for its own sake, we must guarantee citizens that if we use technology it is certainly to gain time and certainly not to make industrial cosmetics “, he says.
“Seuam is already able to inaugurate a new dimension of healthcare and emergency healthcare today, and the satisfaction felt in learning that Sis118’s authoritative interlocutors for the Seuam project are now taking steps to replicate it in Lazio and Veneto, evidently having taken positive note of the farsightedness of its presenters “, concludes Balzanelli.
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