MeDrone- A Smart Drone to Distribute Drugs to Avoid Human Intervention and Social Distancing to Defeat COVID-19 Pandemic for Indian Hospital

• Published in: Journal of physics. Conference series Vol. 1964; no. 6; pp. 62112 - 62122
• Main Authors: Maheswari, R, Ganesan, R, Venusamy, Kanagaraj
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Bristol IOP Publishing 01.07.2021
• Subjects: Coronaviruses; COVID-19; Disease control; Drone; Drones; Drugs; Health care; Logistics; Pandemics; Patients; Pharmacy; Remote Sensing; Social Distancing; Surveillance; Unmanned aerial vehicles
• ISSN: 1742-6588; 1742-6596
• DOI: 10.1088/1742-6596/1964/6/062112

Abstract Many healthcare centres generally have a centralized unit-dose drug distribution system (CUDD). The in-patient’s drugs are warehoused in a centralized location such as hospital pharmacy. The required or prescribed drugs available in the pharmacy will be distributed to the patient by either the nurse or attendant. The attendant often collects the medicine from the pharmacy. This process is quite time-consuming and in this COVID‘19 pandemic should maintain social distancing by the attendant in the pharmacy. In a field where time is of great importance and can save lives and also, a human intervention which in turn need to maintain social distancing, we can use MeDrones that will dispense medicines to the designated patient(s) location which will avoid human intervention and social distancing to defeat COVID-19 pandemic which is the need of the hour. The drone will be designed to deliver payload (tablets/saline) within/across the hospital premises. Apart from delivering medicines to the respective patients, the drone will be equipped to decide the optimal path to reach patients and prioritize attending to critical patients based on the hospital’s central database. The drones can be customized to return the unused medicines from the patient’s location to the pharmacy. Lightweight secured drugs container kit with authentication enabled will be designed for carrying the medicines to distribute to the respective destination inside the healthcare centre. The drone regulations result from increasing demand in UAV that must be devised to permit adaptation extensively as a logistics solution, to escalate efficacy in the healthcare domain.