Rouen's Defibrillator Drone Now Covers 32 Towns

A drone that flies a defibrillator to the scene of a suspected cardiac arrest is now fully operational around Rouen, serving 32 communes from a base at Bois-Guillaume, its operator Delivrone said on 27 October. The project, called AIRDEF, is run by the CHU de Rouen, the city’s university hospital, and its SAMU 76A emergency medical service, according to Delivrone’s post.

The idea is to get a defibrillator into the hands of a bystander before an ambulance arrives. When the hospital announced in August that it had won permission to deploy the drone, it called the system a first in France.

How the drone is dispatched

When someone calls the 15 emergency number about a suspected cardiac arrest, staff at the dispatch centre guide the caller through chest compressions, send an ambulance or fire crew, alert volunteer first responders through the Sauvlife app and look for the nearest public defibrillator. If the situation justifies it, they also launch the drone, according to the CHU de Rouen’s August release.

The drone flies to the caller’s GPS position and gently drops the defibrillator, Delivrone says, and the bystander is guided by phone in using it. “The drone does not replace the emergency services. It complements them,” the company wrote (TSN’s translation).

According to the hospital, the drone can take off about a minute after it is triggered, flies by day and night and in bad weather at up to 65 km/h, covers an area of about 200 km² and can carry up to 3 kg. It was tested for more than a year around Forges-les-Eaux, north-east of Rouen, before being cleared. The hospital says deployment required a change to drone flight rules, worked out with the DSAC, France’s civil aviation safety authority.

Delivrone, a start-up based in Saint-Étienne-du-Rouvray near Rouen, runs the operations. The drones and their take-off bases come from Everdrone, a Swedish company. The project cost about €300,000 for two sites and was backed by the Normandy regional council. The hospital’s service page says the region gave €138,000 to the hospital and €113,000 to Delivrone, which added €40,000 of its own, and that the scheme was inspired by an earlier one in Gothenburg.

Why minutes matter more than the machine

The case for the drone is simple arithmetic. According to the CHU, around 50,000 people a year in France have a cardiac arrest outside hospital, and fewer than 5% survive to 30 days. Without CPR and a defibrillator, the chance of survival falls by about 10% a minute. France has about 500,000 public defibrillators, but around 80% of cardiac arrests happen at home, where none is close by. The hospital says a rapid shock from a defibrillator multiplies the chances of survival by six.

A drone does not need to beat the ambulance by much to matter. If it can put a defibrillator next to a caller a few minutes earlier, that is a few minutes of survival odds recovered. The weak link is the bystander, who has to be willing to open the case and follow instructions while frightened. That is why the dispatcher’s phone guidance is part of the design.

What Rouen has not published yet is evidence. Neither the hospital nor Delivrone has said how many times the drone has flown to a real call, how often it arrived first, or whether anyone has been shocked with a drone-delivered defibrillator. Those numbers will decide whether the model spreads to other French regions.

Others are trying versions of the same idea. Hong Kong plans to pilot drones delivering defibrillators in hill rescues, London’s Great Ormond Street has started NHS drone deliveries with Matternet and Apian, and Uganda is testing drones to fly lab samples from Kalangala. Rouen’s scheme is different because it is wired into the emergency call itself, not into hospital logistics.