2024-03-21 15:42:15
Recreational drones used as a weapon and means of espionage in Ukraine, to monitor populations in China, with the aim, one day, of being used as flying tasers to secure schools in the United States, and even now already for the delivery of drugs and weapons to detention centers in France…
Commercial drone deliveries on the rise
Behind these widely publicized repressive or illicit uses, the use of recreational drones, initially intended for aerial photography, has widely developed in industry and agriculture in particular. In fact, their use for commercial deliveries is booming.
Motivated by their speed and low carbon impact, ten times lower than that of road deliveries, Amazon, the delivery giant, has also invested heavily in drones by creating its subsidiary Amazon Prime Air. This projects more than 500 million annual deliveries by 2030. A new pair of sneakers delivered to your home 30 minutes after an order on the Internet is a “dream” that will soon be accessible.
Programs to urgently deliver medications or blood bags
In terms of delivery, drones can also have a more essential use, for example in the health sector, where they are starting to be used in certain countries for the emergency delivery of medicines or blood bags intended for transfusions. .
Thus, in Rwanda, Zipline, an American start-up, carries out 80% of blood bag deliveries using drones. The solution proposed by Zipline, however, has limitations. Its high cost, the limited range of drones to 80 km and its heavy infrastructure with launch pads explain the fact that for the moment, it is mainly used in rural areas, in small countries characterized by a strong population density and sufficient financial resources.
In Rwanda, Zipline, an American start-up, carries out 80% of its blood bag deliveries by drone.
In West Africa, the drone to improve early HIV detection in newborns
In West and Central Africa, the population density in rural areas is low, the surface areas of the countries are high and financial resources are limited. However, health needs are also important and drones could help improve access to care.
They could in particular be used to improve access to early HIV detection among children born to mothers living with HIV, whose risk of mortality is particularly high in the first two months of life, in the absence of treatment.
Considering the laboratory equipment required for this diagnosis, early diagnosis of newborns is carried out only in a few urban laboratories. When women living with HIV give birth in health facilities that do not have this equipment, the samples must be sent to these reference laboratories.
However, road transport systems are slow and not very functional due to numerous traffic jams in urban areas and the poor condition, or even absence, of road infrastructure in rural areas. Results are often delivered late. Newborns infected with HIV are therefore rarely treated on time, that is to say in their first months of life, which exposes them to a significant risk of death.
In Guinea, a project led by Guinean and European researchers and an NGO
In Guinea, only a third of newborns whose mothers live with HIV are diagnosed. Of those diagnosed with HIV, less than half are estimated to be treated on time, according to unpublished national data.
Conakry, its capital, is infamous for its traffic jams where a trip of a few kilometers can sometimes take several hours. Like many West African metropolises, this capital has experienced rapid urban expansion linked to a significant rural exodus in recent decades.
It was stuck in one of these famous traffic jams in Conakry, watching a video of a drone delivering burgers and beers to Reykjavik in Iceland, that a team from Solthis, an NGO which has been working for 20 years to improve the health in West Africa, had the idea of using drones for a more useful use than the junk food trade.
This involved using drones to urgently transport blood samples and thus make it possible to diagnose and treat the 1,400 children who are born with HIV each year in Guinea. In 2020, Sothis developed the AIRPOP project.
Implemented in partnership with Guinean researchers, HIV program managers, anthropology researchers from the Institute of Research for Development (IRD) and, in modeling, from the Lincoln International Institute for Rural Health and with the support of the National Agency for Research on AIDS, Viral Hepatitis and Emerging Infectious Diseases (ANRS MIE), the AIRPOP project sought to evaluate the cost/effectiveness and acceptability of transporting samples by drone.
A cost-effective solution in terms of number of lives saved, according to the first tests
The challenge was to test a solution, acceptable to the population and financeable in countries with limited resources. The project compared the efficiency and cost of drone transport with motorcycle transport and the current car system.
Modeling has shown that the drone is a cost-effective solution in terms of the number of lives saved, despite investment and maintenance costs higher than that of motorcycles or cars, for a country with limited resources like Guinea.
At the same time, automated drone flights were carried out between two health structures to test feasibility in an urban context and an anthropological study analyzed the perceptions of the stakeholders concerned. Generally speaking, drones enjoy a rather positive perception in a recent context of political unrest where these devices have been used by journalists and opposition parties to document the scale of demonstrations.
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However, various fears, such as that of diversion by terrorist groups, give rise to concern and underline the need for clear information to the population. Our work on the issue will be published soon.
However, the encouraging results of the test arouse the interest of the country’s health authorities and create the favorable conditions to continue the research necessary for the country’s deployment of this innovation throughout the territory.
The AIRPOP project carried out in Guinea compared the efficiency and cost of transporting blood samples by drone with transport by motorbike and the current system by car.
Also pool drones for transporting blood bags during childbirth
After this first test phase, AIRPOP2 will evaluate the use of drones in Conakry and in rural areas with the ambition of proposing this strategy across the country to enable screening and treatment of the 1,400 children who are born with HIV each year. It will also explore the benefit of pooling drones for the urgent transport of other health products, in particular blood bags for women experiencing hemorrhage during childbirth, the leading cause of maternal deaths in Africa.
Although drone manufacturers are currently mainly based in the richest countries, the simplicity of manufacturing techniques and the means already invested to improve the performance of drones, lead us to believe that in the near future, manufacturers could emerge in West Africa.
This would only improve the cost-effectiveness of this solution and simplify maintenance. Let us dare to imagine that, in the eyes of investors, saving human lives could constitute an issue as important as that of urgently delivering burgers and sneakers to the four corners of the world.
This article was co-written by: Guillaume Breton, Maxime Inghels, Oumou Hawa Diallo, Mohamed Cissé, Youssouf Koita and Gabrièle Laborde-Balen.
Participated in this study: (1) Solthis, Paris, France; (2) Lincoln International Institute for Rural Health, University of Lincoln, Lincoln, United Kingdom; (3) Solthis, Conakry, Guinea; (4) Department of Dermatology, Outpatient Treatment Center, Molecular Biology Laboratory, Donka University Hospital, Conakry, Guinea; (5) National Program for the Fight against HIV AIDS and Hepatitis (PNLSH), Conakry, Guinea; (6) TransVIHMI, University of Montpellier, Inserm, Institute of Research for Development, Montpellier, France.
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