The Case for Drone-assisted Emergency Response to Cardiac Arrest: An Optimized Statewide Deployment Approach.

Despite evidence linking rapid defibrillation to out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA) survival, bystander use of automatic external defibrillators (AEDs) remains low, due in part to AED placement and accessibility. AED-equipped drones may improve time-to-defibrillation, yet the benefits and costs are unknown. We designed drone deployment networks for the state of North Carolina using mathematical optimization models to select drone stations from existing infrastructure by specifying the number of stations and the targeted AED arrival time.