The Epipen Drone

A Home Built Drone to Save Lives

Motivation for the Project:

  1. Researchers estimate that up to 15 million Americans have food allergies.
  2. This potentially deadly disease affects 1 in every 13 children (under 18 years of age) in the U.S. That’s roughly two in every classroom.
  3. The economic cost of children’s food allergies is nearly $25 billion per year.
  4. Every 3 minutes, a food allergy reaction sends someone to the emergency department – that is more than 200,000 emergency department visits per year.
  5. Somewhere around 150 to 200 people die in the U.S. each year because of food allergies.

Even though I cannot prevent kids and adults from having food allergies, I wanted to help them get an epipen on time so that less time is wasted in emergency rooms and hospital visits.

Problem statement:

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control reported that food allergies result in more than 300,000 ambulatory-care visits a year among children under the age of 18. Food allergy is the leading cause of anaphylaxis outside the hospital setting. Once an anaphylactic reaction starts, an epipen is the first line of defense to treat the reaction. But because the epipen is not available on time, sadly each year almost 200 people die of a severe allergic reaction.

Approach:

I started thinking about these astounding facts and thought, what would be the fastest way to get the Epipen to someone so that I could potentially save their life?

I thought of something that could fly, so it would be faster than the speed of a person walking or running. It could easily overcome obstacles or blocks, such as walls to take the shortest  and fastest route possible for a timely delivery.

I decided to build a Quadcopter, however there were several challenges waiting for me. First, I had never build a Quadcopter on my own, nor had I ever flown a store bought one. I researched a lot on how to built a quadcopter of my own, I started by shortlisting the minimal parts needed to build a quadcopter. Then I slowly, and continuously crept my way closer to my goal, delivering an epipen to those in need.

Needless to say, it was a very interesting project with several failures and a lot of learning along the way.

Materials List:

http://bit.ly/theepipendrone_materials

Procedure:

http://bit.ly/theepipendrone_procedure

Results:

After a lot of time, failures and test flights, I was finally able to build a Quadcopter of my own that can fly at 2 meters per second at its slowest.  So, even if someone is 100 meters away, this Quadcopter can bring the Epipen to them in under 50 seconds.

Conclusions:

I’m happy I was able to build a Quadcopter that can fly at a reasonable speed that is definitely much faster than the speed of a human. However, as next steps, I would like to work on making it faster, smoother and more efficient in delivering help on time to save lives and help people live longer and happier.

Comments are closed.