In October, Belgian student Alec Momont graduated with a perfect score from the Faculty of Design Engineering. And no wonder, given that his thesis project can potentially increase the chance of survival after a cardiac arrest from 8% to 80%.
“I’m only the 5th person in 45 years to get a score of 10 at IDE,” he says.
Momont’s project involved creating a prototype of an unmanned, autonomous drone that can deliver a defibrillator wherever it’s needed. Made together with the Living Tomorrow innovation platform, the drone can provide feedback to emergency services and give the people on site instructions on how to treat the patient. At 4 kgs, with an additional capacity to carry 4 kgs, the drone can fly at 100 km/h and uses the caller’s GPS signal to track them down.
“I have always been fascinated with flight, from foldable planes at the age of 6, RC places at 12 to acquiring a gliding license at 18. I felt that flight is a very special thing and that it can be used in ways previously unimaginable, especially with the emergence of autopilots such as the Lisa/S developed at the TU Delft. I wanted to use drone technology in a positive way, and not just for pizza deliveries,” he said.
This led to a design for a new type of drone, one that could accommodate a medical toolbox. He started with the defibrillator given the fact that 800,000 people suffer from a cardiac arrest in the EU each year but only 8% survive. The time taken by response units (around 10 minutes) is usually the cause for fatalities. With the drone, the defibrillator reaches patients within a 12 km2 zone within a minute. “It is one of the most urgent medical devices available that can be operated by laypeople,” he said, adding that future applications could also include other medical devices.
He has discussed the possibility of real world application of the project with Ambulance services Amsterdam & UZ Gent and says they have all been very positive. It wasn’t smooth sailing during the project though. For one, Momont had to have multiple knee surgeries during his graduation work. Working with drones was also tricky as the slightest mistake in the prototyping phase could lead to a crash and therefore set one back by a couple of weeks. “Which is something that happened to me,” he said.
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