Paris, France: Drones could be used to deliver automated external defibrillators (AEDs) to where a person is suffering an out-of-hospital cardiac arrest, according to a study presented at the European Emergency Medicine Congress today (Saturday).
AEDs can often be located some distances apart, making timely access to them uneven, particularly in rural areas or in heavily congested urban environments. However, the research presented today showed that delivering AEDs by drone, combined with providing more fixed AEDs, significantly reduced the time between an out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA) being reported and the start of defibrillation.
“Out-of-hospital cardiac arrest is a major public health issue. Survival depends strongly on early cardiopulmonary resuscitation and timely defibrillation,” Dr Hillary Minka, an emergency physician at the Lariboisière Hospital in Paris, told the congress. “Every minute of delay before defibrillation reduces the chances of survival.
“We wanted to investigate whether drones could provide faster AED access than road-based retrieval of existing fixed AEDs and thereby improve access to defibrillation across the Ile-de-France region.”
Dr Minka and her colleagues used data on OHCAs in seven departments (administrative areas) in the Île-de-France, excluding central Paris, to conduct a computer simulation study that looked at three strategies:
They divided the region into units called Ilots Regroupés pour l'Information Statistique (IRIS), which are the smallest census areas used by the French National Institute of Statistics. They estimated the amount of time needed for an AED to arrive at the centre of each unit via each of the three strategies. They also evaluated several potential locations for drone deployment, including existing AED sites, mobile intensive care units (MICUs) and fire stations.
They found that access to AEDs was very mixed, with a scarcity in the countryside and in the areas on the outskirts of Paris. To improve access to fixed AEDs, a further 1,712 AEDs would need to be added to 1,893 existing AEDs, making a total of 3,605.
Using drones significantly reduced the time spent waiting for access to an AED. The researchers found this depended both on the number of drones deployed and their geographical positioning.
In the hybrid strategy combining fixed AEDs and drones, AED access times were reduced by an average of 3.76 minutes across all IRIS units. AEDs were delivered to more than 95% of OHCA cases within five minutes, compared to only 30-40% of cases when relying on transport from existing fixed AED locations via the road network. The researchers estimated that using 200 drone bases and 871 fixed AED sites could extend AED coverage to nearly all OHCAs (28,349 cases), achieving an overall coverage rate of 99.4%.
Dr Minka said: “Our study showed that drone delivery of AEDs could reduce the times to defibrillation across all the IRIS units by several minutes, with particularly large benefits in peripheral and highly congested areas. In some cases, the time saved exceeded ten minutes.
“Our findings also suggest that this hybrid strategy could provide very broad territorial coverage while limiting the need to install hundreds of additional AEDs. This would increase the range to 3,900 metres, compared to 500 metres for fixed AEDs only.”
The researchers envisage that the drones could be operated by specially trained people or automated systems under the supervision of emergency services. When the drone arrives at the scene of an OHCA, a bystander who is already present would collect the AED and start to use it on the patient, guided by the emergency services.
“Drones will never replace bystanders, resuscitation efforts or emergency medical teams,” said Dr Minka. “However, they could represent an additional link in the chain of survival and help make defibrillation available more quickly. This study also shows that improving access to AEDs depends not only on the number of devices available, but also on how they are geographically distributed and organised. In some areas, drones could therefore represent a complementary strategy to large-scale deployment of additional fixed AEDs.”
She said the study’s findings would need to be confirmed in prospective studies and real-world experiments.
“Our findings highlight the potential value of investing in innovative solutions aimed at reducing inequalities in access to emergency care and optimising the geographical distribution of emergency resources,” she concluded.
A strength of the study is that it analysed seven departments of the Île-de-France region using a detailed geospatial approach based on real-world cardiac arrest data. A limitation is that it is a simulation study, no drones were deployed and so their performance is based on theoretical models. The drone travel time was estimated using straight line distances (“as the crow flies”) and, therefore, did not account for regulatory, meteorological or operational constraints that could influence real-world deployment.
Dr Felix Lorang is a member of the EUSEM abstract selection committee. He is head of the emergency department at Klinikum Lippe, North Rhine-Westfalia, Germany, and was not involved with the research. He said: “Drones are being used for an increasingly wide range of purposes and this study shows how they could make an important contribution to the emergency services, enabling AEDs to reach people suffering heart attacks more quickly. However, it is vitally important that, in every country, as many members of the public as possible know how to provide cardiopulmonary resuscitation and how to use defibrillators. Without this training, someone suffering an out-of-hospital cardiac arrest would still have to wait for the arrival of the emergency services, even if an AED is positioned nearby or arrives quickly by drone.”
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[1] Abstract no: OA066, “Optimizing automated external defibrillator access using drones: a geospatial analysis in the Paris region” by Hillary Minka, Best abstracts session, Saturday 26 September, 11:00-12:30 hrs CEST, room 142.
Computational simulation/modeling
Not applicable
Optimizing automated external defibrillator access using drones: a geospatial analysis in the Paris region
26-Sep-2026