Joint planning of drones and volunteers in emergency response to out-of-hospital cardiac arrest

Various initiatives are in place worldwide to reduce the time from the occurrence of an out-of-hospital cardiac arrest to the start of cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) and defibrillation using an Automated External Defibrillator (AED). In addition to optimizing the management of emergency medical services and other professional emergency response resources, these include utilizing close-by volunteers using mobile phone dispatching, and delivering AEDs using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), commonly known as drones. The latter two examples have previously been studied separately, and it has been proved that the time to administer CPR and AED delivery can be reduced. In this paper, the potential of joint planning and dispatching of volunteers and AED delivering drones is investigated. Optimization models are used to determine good locations for drones. These are then evaluated, together with new, adapted dispatch strategies for the volunteers, using a simulation model. Results of a case study, with data for the county of Vastra Gotaland in Sweden, show that drones can indeed help reduce the time to defibrillation, and, by adaptive dispatching, the time to CPR can be reduced as well. Thus, it is shown that by joint planning of drones and volunteers, it may be possible to improve the survival probability from out-of-hospital cardiac arrest.