Saving lives with cell-aimed drones
Zipline’s blood deliveries demonstrate how innovation needs policy and political will to be successful
In a small hospital in Rwanda, a 24-year-old mother gave birth but immediately began to bleed with what doctors call postpartum haemorrhage. In thousands of cases like this every year across Africa, this condition often results in the mother’s death when rural clinics or hospitals don’t have enough blood to stabilise a bleeding patient.
But in this case, a remarkable operation leapt into action. Because Rwanda has been willing to experiment with a new way of distributing its blood supply, the hospital called the blood distribution centre in the capital Kigali, and within 30 minutes blood was delivered using a Zipline drone.
Several flights of blood were dispatched that day, effectively saving the young mother’s life.
Zipline is an astounding solution to a serious problem: how to maintain emergency blood supplies in a challenging environment, which requires cold storage to transport blood to hospitals and then uninterrupted electricity to keep it cool.
Zipline, the brainchild of American Keller Rinaudo, uses an aircraftshaped drone to deliver blood within 15-30 minutes to hospitals and clinics within 75 km of Kigali. The blood is stored in fridges at a base outside the capital. When a call comes in, it is packaged with a parachute, and loaded onto a drone which is catapulted into the air. Once it has taken off, the drone autonomously guides itself to the hospital using cellphone networks.
When the drone arrives at the hospital, it descends to 30 m and drops the parachute. “Just like ride sharing, the doctors get a text message to
‘walk outside and receive your package’,” Rinaudo said at Tedglobal in Arusha, Tanzania, last month.
And it saves lives. “We have [managed] 400 emergencies like that,” he said. “Maternal health is a challenge everywhere. The difference is that in Rwanda we have Zipline.”
When the Rwandan government saw Rinaudo’s clever idea, they were willing to take a risk — demonstrating how such remarkable innovation needs the right policy and political will to make it work. Zipline has delivered 2,400 blood units since the project began in October 2016, including regular weekly blood supplies. Last month the Tanzanian government announced it would also use Zipline.
Using the cellular networks for the drones to guide themselves to their destinations is one of the consequences of the great wireless switchon in Africa.
Mobile money services (like Kenya’s M-pesa) have also flourished.
“Most people living in developed countries think drone delivery is technically impossible,” Rinaudo said.
The programme has proved how radical innovation can be achieved in the right regulatory environment. Using Zipline, not one unit of blood has expired. “That’s an amazing result. That has not been achieved by any other health-care system on the planet. Africa can be the disrupter. These small agile economies can leapfrog with newer and better systems.”
Maternal health is a challenge everywhere. The difference is that Rwanda has Zipline