Drone Delivers Kidney for Successful Human
Transplant
by Mark Huber
- April 26, 2019, 1:22 PM
Last week, GE Aviation unit Airxos participated in the world's first drone flight that delivered a donor kidney for actual human transplant. The flight was a collaboration between transplant physicians and researchers at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore, aviation and engineering experts at the University of Maryland, and collaborators at the Living Legacy Foundation of Maryland.
On April 19, at approximately 12:30
a.m., a human donor kidney was loaded onto the University of Maryland
Medical Center (UMMC) drone. The flight, led by the University of
Maryland UAS Test Site at St. Mary's County, commenced at 1 a.m. The
vehicle traveled 2.6 miles and flew for approximately 10 minutes. The kidney
was successfully delivered to UMMC for a 5 a.m. transplant surgery. The drone’s
flight was monitored by Airxos's Air Mobility platform that enables
unmanned traffic management applications, operations, and services. Air
Mobility manages the volume, density, and variety of unmanned traffic data and
coordinates and integrates it within a secure, FAA-compliant, gated cloud
environment.
Organ transport by drone had been previously
tested with success between medical facilities by the University of Maryland
UAS Test Site in St. Mary's County, this was the first time the flight
operation was used to deliver an organ for transplant. The flight
employed a specially designed apparatus for maintaining and monitoring the
kidney; a custom-built eight-rotor drone with multiple powertrains to ensure
redundancy; the use of a mesh network of radios to control the drone, monitor
its status, and provide communications for the ground crew at multiple
locations; and aircraft operating systems that combined best practices from
both UAS and organ transport standards.
"This flight demonstrated how air mobility
can transform the delivery of medical care in ways that can have significant
impact on lives. It lays the foundation for future advanced drone operations,”
said Airxos CEO Ken Stewart.
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