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Drone Services RigiTech “to Deliver Medical Healthcare Across Maldives”  

A drone ser­vice is ide­al for fly­ing and deliv­er­ing across scat­tered, but close­ly-bound islands and Swiss-based Rig­itech is soon to trans­port med­i­cines and health­care prod­ucts to the 26 inhab­it­ed atolls that make up the Mal­dives, reports a press release.

News first broke last Sep­tem­ber when ini­tial tri­als by Rig­itech began from the Gaffe Dhaalu island. The company’s craft are capa­ble of car­ry­ing 6kg of goods and can trav­el up to 80 km on one bat­tery charge. The tests have proven very suc­cess­ful.

Ahmed Adil,  the for­mer Mal­dives Health Min­is­ter of State, com­ment­ed, “This will be a very use­ful ser­vice espe­cial­ly for the more remote islands. Patients can send sam­ples with­out trav­el­ling and if you can’t trav­el because of poor weath­er, you can now get the ser­vice this way.”

Today’s Min­is­ter, Abdul­la Khaleel, added, “Efforts are under­way to tran­si­tion to a more cost-effec­tive and effi­cient sys­tem for imme­di­ate med­i­cine deliv­ery. The drone ser­vice will kick­start this ini­tia­tive.”

The craft can pick up med­i­cines, vac­cines and health­care prod­ucts from the var­i­ous atoll region­al hos­pi­tals and deliv­er them to peo­ple who require them. If sam­ples are required, they can be col­lect­ed.

The Mal­dives gov­ern­ment launched the tri­als after exten­sive research with input from rel­e­vant tech­ni­cal experts. The drones are to be man­aged by the State Trad­ing Organ­i­sa­tion (STO) and oper­at­ed by local peo­ple who have been trained to safe­ly fly them.

Last week, the Gov­ern­ment stat­ed that a full and exten­sive drone deliv­ery ser­vice across the Mal­dives will begin “with­in the next six months.” This is a feath­er in the cap for Rig­itech who beat var­i­ous com­pe­ti­tion to land the deal. Flight Per­mis­sion has been grant­ed by the Civ­il Avi­a­tion author­i­ty.

Back­ground

The Mal­dives is the small­est coun­try in Asia com­pris­ing of 26 inhab­it­ed atolls cov­er­ing just 115 sq. miles. With a pop­u­la­tion of 515,000 peo­ple, the cap­i­tal is Malé. Inde­pen­dence from the UK occurred in 1965 and today it is part of the Com­mon­wealth after rejoin­ing in 2020 (with­drew in 1982).

For more infor­ma­tion

https://rigi.tech/

(Images: Cred­it — Nis­han Ali/Mihaaru/STO)

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