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Strategic Placement of Ambulance Drones for Delivering Defibrillators to Out of Hospital Cardiac Arrest Victims

The number of out of hospital cardiac arrest (OHCAs) that occur in Sweden every year is really high and there are very few survivors. When a cardiac arrest happens the heart loses its original rhythm and to find it again the heart needs to be shocked within minutes. There is on going research to see what can be done to improve the survival rate. Publicly accessible defibrillators are one thing that is being implemented. Another solution being considered right now is the possibility of delivering a defibrillator by a drone, especially to places that are difficult to be reached by the ambulance. A test flight with this kind of drone will take place in Stockholm, Sweden in June 2015 and the purpose of this thesis was to analyze where the most suitable place would be to start the drone from for a test flight. The area studied was Stockholm County and the data used contained Out of Hospital Cardiac arrest occurrences between the years of 2006 and 2013 including the time it took for the ambulance to arrive at the scene. The analysis was done with Multi Criteria Evaluation. Multi Criteria Evaluation is a power spatial analysis tool that considers multiple criteria in decision-making environments. With Multi Criteria Evaluation suitable places can be found by adding different data and weighing them according to their importance. In this study a raster with interpolated values was produced from ambulance arrival times and this was weighed against a raster created from the density of previous OHCA cases. Results showed that the best place for a drone like this would be the city center since that is where most OHCAs occur but also the northern parts of the archipelago because of the time it takes for the ambulance to get there.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:kth-170183
Date January 2015
CreatorsLennartsson, Josefin
PublisherKTH, Geoinformatik
Source SetsDiVA Archive at Upsalla University
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeStudent thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text
Formatapplication/pdf
Rightsinfo:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
RelationSoM EX KAND ; 2015-01

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