Jess Adamson: Drones are the future for health, emergencies, transport, police and travel
Imagine a future where drones transport full paramedic crews or spot fevers from the air, and flights to Kangaroo Island cost $20. It’s not far away, writes Jess Adamson.
Opinion
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I spent three days last week with some of the most courageous people I’ve ever met.
They are the men and women who are there for us when disaster strikes – deadly floods, air rescues, high-speed crashes and terror attacks.
They are the doctors and nurses, paramedics and pilots who provided critical care at the Singleton bus crash, the Eyre Peninsula bushfires and the Port Arthur massacre. When everyone else is getting out, they’re rushing in.
Some I’d met before, in Banda Aceh back in 2004, when a tsunami, triggered by a 9.1 magnitude earthquake, killed 170,000 people and virtually wiped the city from the map.
Others emerged from the ashes of the Bali bombings as heroes, when global terrorism came knocking on our door and Australia responded with the most extraordinary retrieval operation in our nation’s history.
They gathered in Adelaide last week for an international aeromedical conference, sharing stories of success and of heartbreaking failures, with a united goal of improving patient care.
Planes and helicopters are at the centre of almost all the rescues and retrievals they’re involved in, but now, there’s a new kid on their block.
Drones. They’re not new to us – they’re everyday tools in agriculture, defence, even real estate. But they’re strangely under-utilised in the aeromedical sector and there’s growing excitement about how they can help our crippled health system.
Drones and Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) will play a major role in improving our health in the very near future. The technology is advancing at a staggering rate.
Who knew drones with thermal cameras were used to measure people’s temperatures along the Queensland coast during Covid, detecting fevers and hotspots? Not me.
It wasn’t so long ago we were scouring the shelves of JB HiFi to find a drone that actually worked. Now they have built in AI and can think for themselves.
Imagine there’s a full-scale siege involving hostages in a city building. If STAR Group officers can smash a door open, a drone can fly in, scan every room, fly back out and police incident controllers will have a 3D map on their laptop within a minute. Low risk, zero human emotion.
Our bomb squad uses drones to help identify suspicious packages and they’re increasingly being deployed in searches.
The possibilities in law and order are endless, a stolen car wreaking havoc on our roads at night for example. A drone can read a number plate at 8000 feet. It’s airborne within seconds, quiet and environmentally friendly. In many big cities, they’re permanently in the air, ready to respond to any danger at a moment’s notice – a fire, a house break in, an assault.
We need to get our heads around how fast this is moving and what that means for each of us, particularly in the healthcare sector. We shouldn’t be scared or sceptical of drones, their time has come.
Already they’re being used to deliver lifesaving medications and vaccines to remote outback and Indigenous communities across the country, a move that will revolutionise regional healthcare.
They’ll eventually deliver to nursing homes and even our homes, carry our blood to labs for testing and drop vital supplies in a natural disaster or disease outbreak.
In a rescue situation they can be the first “eyes” on because of their speed, agility and ability to operate in bad light, low cloud, poor visibility and complex terrain.
They are the first responders, like a defibrillator, until a medical team arrives.
Toll Aviation does an average of three helicopter winch rescues a week in Australia, many of them hikers who come unstuck. The company is now ready to integrate drones into their missions.
They recently replicated the real-life rescue of a young couple stranded overnight in the Blue Mountains. A drone dropped water and mobile data equipment, allowing the couple to talk to and text their rescuers at HQ until a helicopter crew was able to winch them out at first light. It highlighted just how much the technology can complement our traditional aircraft.
Electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft (eVTOL) are on our doorstep and they’re promising to slash travel costs as well as shake up the way we move.
The Vertiia, created and built in a Sydney warehouse, is powered by electric batteries and hydrogen. It takes off and lands like a helicopter and can fly at 300km/h, up to 1000 kilometres, with up to six people on board.
Its co-founder Andrew Moore, AMSL Aero, is confident of CASA certification in 2026.
He estimates the Vertiia could take us from Adelaide to Kingscote in 20 minutes for around $70, with that cost likely to drop to as little as $20 as hydrogen prices fall.
There are hundreds of creations like the Vertiia on trial and they could be airborne in fewer than five years.
Some industry experts say they’ll operate at around a quarter of the cost of a helicopter and that without as many moving parts, they’ll be safer. They’re easy to control, more manoeuvrable and will do well on a landscape like South Australia’s, which is relatively flat.
So, what about driverless drones? Is it realistic to think that within the next decade we could be buzzing around the sky like the Jetsons, to get to a hospital?
Yes. There are trials underway that Australia’s Civil Aviation Safety Authority is watching closely. Of course, we need to be 100 per cent sure these vehicles can monitor what’s in their airspace but not all our ambulances in the future will have a driver.
Get ready for an aircraft to come to you with just a small medical crew on board. The return flight path would be preset by a hospital or ambulance control centre. Ramping? What ramping?
Imagine you’re bitten by a brown snake in the Flinders Ranges. Help is on its way quickly, in the form of a driverless drone. With the clock ticking and in the absence of anything else, are you going to get in? I think I am.
This isn’t a drill. The technology is already here and expected to be in use within a decade. We, the passengers, need to be ready to get on board
So, what does that mean for our healthcare heroes, the doctors, nurses, pilots and paramedics?
They’re not going anywhere. More than anything else, we still need the human touch, someone to stick us back together when everything goes wrong, our dames and knights in shining armour. For now, a drone cannot winch us, revive us, stitch us or comfort us.
Our medics are the only constant in this rapidly moving landscape but getting to them is going to look very different. And it’s going to come sooner than we think.
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