“Skyports, AZ Turnhout Launch Medical Drone Delivery Service in Kempen, Belgium” 

Sky­ports Drone Ser­vices, a leader in drone deliv­ery and inspec­tion ser­vices for health­care, mar­itime, logis­tics and ener­gy use cas­es, and AZ Turn­hout, a pri­ma­ry health­care provider in the province of Antwerp, has launched a med­ical drone deliv­ery tri­al in Kem­pen, Bel­gium, reports a press release.

The release explains, “The ser­vice is using drones to trans­port urgent med­ical car­go between the hos­pi­tal cam­pus­es of AZ Turn­hout St Jozef and AZ Herentals, using A‑kwadraat as a cen­tral oper­a­tional hub.”

It con­tin­ues, “Fly­ing BVLOS and using a Remote Oper­a­tions Cen­tre (ROC) to pilot the drones, the project aims to deliv­er urgent med­ical car­go faster and more effi­cient­ly than the cur­rent sys­tem of van and bike deliv­er­ies, which is slow­er and often con­strained by deliv­ery sched­ules.”

Jef Geu­dens, Head of Tech­nol­o­gy, Sky­ports Drone Ser­vices, com­ment­ed, “Sky­ports is enabling the future cen­tral­i­sa­tion of lab­o­ra­to­ry activ­i­ties in spe­cialised hubs such as A‑kwadraat. This means that not every hos­pi­tal needs to invest in the same cost­ly infra­struc­ture. This can help accel­er­ate access to per­son­alised treat­ments, such as patient-spe­cif­ic chemother­a­py, which can be deliv­ered faster and made avail­able across mul­ti­ple loca­tions.”

The Two Planned Drone Deliv­ery Routes

In a major reg­u­la­to­ry break­through, Sky­ports has secured approval for the drones to be pilot­ed remote­ly from its ROC in Buck­ing­hamshire, UK that will allow the deliv­ery net­work to be scaled up eas­i­ly, reduc­ing deliv­ery costs for the med­ical net­work.

Gri­et Braek­mans, Direc­tor of Facil­i­ties and Project Man­ag­er at AZ Turn­hout, remarked, “For years, we’ve been work­ing togeth­er with oth­er hos­pi­tals in the Kem­pen region and A‑kwadraat in the areas of med­ica­tion and pathol­o­gy sam­ples. Over the past five years, we’ve focused on organ­is­ing trans­port between hos­pi­tals in an effi­cient and sus­tain­able way. With drones, we can pro­vide more per­son­alised care for patients and improve col­lab­o­ra­tion between hos­pi­tals.”

For the first stage of the project Sky­ports is fly­ing the Rig­iTech Eiger and the Speed­bird DLV‑2. The Eiger will be used to fly the A‑kwadraat to AZ Herentals route, cov­er­ing the 18.7km dis­tance in 13 min­utes (com­pared to 30 mins by road), fly­ing at an aver­age cruise speed of 29 m/s with a nom­i­nal oper­at­ing alti­tude of 80m and a max­i­mum pay­load of 3kg. 

Rig­iTech Eiger Drone

The DLV‑2 is fly­ing the A‑kwadraat to St Jozef route, cov­er­ing the 4.4km dis­tance in 7 min­utes (com­pared to 16 mins by road), at an aver­age cruise speed of 16 m/s and a nom­i­nal oper­at­ing alti­tude of 50 metres, with a max pay­load of 5kg.

In June, air­space receivers were installed on the roofs of all the hos­pi­tals in the region to help facil­i­tate the drone oper­a­tions, ensur­ing that these craft can inte­grate with exist­ing crewed air­space. Pre­ci­sion land­ing QR bar­codes have also been placed at each loca­tion to mark the auto­mat­ed drone land­ing sites.

For the first phase of the tri­al the drones will be fly­ing 5 days a week, with a longer term goal to devel­op the first per­ma­nent med­ical drone deliv­ery net­work in Bel­gium, pro­vid­ing auto­mat­ed sta­tions at key hos­pi­tal sites in Kem­pen which could be oper­at­ed 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

The tri­als are sup­port­ed by the Belgium/Netherlands U‑space Ref­er­ence Design Imple­men­ta­tion (BURDI) Project, which aims to ensure safe and sus­tain­able inte­gra­tion of mul­ti­ple drone oper­a­tions includ­ing BVLOS, along­side tra­di­tion­al manned avi­a­tion. The project is co-fund­ed by the Euro­pean Union and SESAR Joint Under­tak­ing. Oth­er tech­ni­cal part­ners include Bel­gian com­pa­nies Skey­drone and Uni­fly.

A med­ical wing at one of the hos­pi­tal cam­pus­es

Back­ground

AZ Turn­hout has two cam­pus­es and is the main health­care provider in the region. The hos­pi­tal offers patients spe­cialised and high-qual­i­ty care close to home. The organ­i­sa­tion treats 26,000 patients per year and has 2,300 staff mem­bers and 190 doc­tors.

For more infor­ma­tion

https://skyportsdroneservices.com/

https://www.azturnhout.be

(Top image: Sky­ports Speed­bird DLV‑2 Drone)

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