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For the first time ever, the FAA has approved the routine commercial use of drones to carry a product.
The WakeMed program will start by flying patients’ medical samples one-third of a mile (.5 kilometer) from a medical park to the main hospital building for lab testing at least six times a day five days a week, Matternet CEO Andreas Raptopoulos said in an interview. Vials of blood or other specimens will be loaded into a secure box and carried to a drone launching pad, where they will be fastened to the aircraft and flown to another building. He said the flights will technically be within sight of operators on either end of the route, and they are authorized to fly above people.
Samples are typically driven on the ground and the goal of this project is to cut down how long it typically takes to transport time-sensitive samples to their destination for testing.
the North Carolina program could expand to flying miles-long routes between Raleigh-area WakeMed buildings in the coming months, Raptopoulos said. He also said medical specimen flights could start at one or two more hospitals in other cities later in 2019.
Other approvals by the FAA have been for limited tests and demos.
North Carolina is one of nine sites participating in the FAA’s pilot program to accelerate integrating drones for new uses ranging from utility inspections to insurance claims. The test sites get leeway trying new innovations while working closely with the federal officials in charge of regulating the drones.
Can we get a black-helicopter drone that doesn't make any noise?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by urza9814 on Thursday March 28 2019, @01:37PM
A pneumatic system would probably be cheaper and easier for this test installation, as it sounds like they're practically flying the thing next door. But if it was expected to be viable by itself, it wouldn't be a test installation, it would just be an installation. Running pneumatic tubes across several miles as they plan to do with these drones in the future would be quite a bit more difficult (particularly if they don't own the property in between), and also a lot less flexible should they need to add or relocate facilities in the future.
As for the noise and falling drones concerns...that's up to the FAA to regulate. But given that these are being used to carry medical tests, I imagine one of the primary concerns would actually be the test samples getting into someone else's hands. Violating patient privacy is a pretty serious offense -- my company once faced millions of dollars *per day* in fines just because our developers (who do get annual HIPAA training and such) could view PHI in our production database, so if that kind of data gets into the hands of non-employees then the medical center is likely going to be facing a massive shitstorm. Even if they don't care about the drone falling on someone's head, they probably know better than to let the test samples drop, so those drones ought to be pretty robust. Also the possibility of falling vials of potentially infected blood...so many potential lawsuits here they'd better be damn careful. But that would be why they're testing it by flying the things next door for now...