This image did it for me today. A giant drone serving as an emergency ambulance after a car crash.
For real? Not yet.
For the moment it’s just in the heads of design team Argodesign who were asked for Body Week by Co about what was thé one thing in the health care industry desperately needed to be redesigned and how? Well, they had a wild conceptual solution.
Their insight was this: In emergencies, every second counts. An estimated 1000 saveable lives are lost per year in the UK because of slow emergency response in traffic-jammed urban environment. How can a four-wheeled ambulance be expected to make it anywhere and back quickly?
So they came with this one-person ambulance drone modeled after a standard quad copter—driven by a GPS, a pilot, or combination of both—that could be dispatched to an emergency scene with a single EMT.
It’s designed to land almost anywhere, thanks to a footprint the size of a compact car. The EMT stabilizes the patient, loads him up, and sends him back to the hospital for further treatment.
We all know technology is evolving with the speed of light nowadays. Technology, biology and science are blending and making enormous progress and these kind of projects will be faster part of our daily life than we realize.
Assuming this ambulance drone could build soon, think about the drone’s benefits: super fast access to the accident spot, no unexpected traffic issues and a single pilot that manages a whole fleet of drone ambulances remotely, relying on autopilot through the skies, and taking over manual controls only during more complicated takeoffs and landings. Great.
The concept is not producible yet. One of the designers of Argodesign explains: “we may have underestimated the wingspan challenge for lift, but in a greater scheme of things, that’s a trivial part of the idea.”
I think so too.
Go ahead boys.
Later!
Kate
All images courtesy of Argodesign for Co.Design
The Squid Stories ‚Image of the day’ thanks Mark Wilson, writer for Fastcodesign for spotting this ‚Image of the day’ story.