Drone carrying a defibrillator saves its first heart attack patient in Sweden

Everdrone plans to expand the service in Sweden later this year.

A man in Sweden is alive today thanks to — in part — a drone. The 71-year-old experienced a cardiac arrest while shoveling snow in December and was resuscitated by a nearby doctor after a drone flew in a defibrillator, Everdrone reported Tuesday.

Someone experiencing cardiac arrest needs help within 10 minutes in order to survive. Everdrone’s Emergency Medical Aerial Delivery (EMADE) service is designed to deliver help as quickly as possible — it allows emergency dispatchers to send a drone carrying the device to a caller’s home, kickstarting the lifesaving process before the ambulance arrives at their home. In this particular patient’s case, it took three minutes for the services to deliver the defibrillator to his home. A bystander, who happened to be a doctor on the way to his job, used the AED on the patient after providing CPR.

The drone was developed with the Center for Resuscitation Science at Karolinska Institutet, SOS Alarm, and Region Västra Götaland.