Fight or Flight Response: Disaster Drones
The Future of Disaster Relief 

The Challenge

Natural disasters, armed conflicts, and economic instability threaten humanity’s survival. It only takes minutes for disaster to strike, but it can take weeks to grapple with the aftermath as the military and other nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) struggle to respond to the needs of those hardest hit.
In the digital age that is 2017, there is still no standard way to track patients; we rely on toe tagging and permanent markers to track patients as rescue staging care units perform basic medical services from triage to transport and hospital arrival.

SwerveLogic, Perforce, and the Naval Postgraduate School Joint Interagency Field Experimentation Program believe that emerging technologies can and should reshape the way we approach disaster response to speed up recovery efforts and reduce loss of life.

The Solution​

Our goal is to get patient data, no matter how voluminous in size — images, videos, voice recordings, charts, vital stats — to the next stage of care with or before the patient’s arrival so that hospitals can prepare to treat patients as quickly and efficiently as possible. 
Swerve makes it easy to update and share files as they move from one person to the next in the field.

Our experiment consists of collecting and collating patient data with mobile devices such as phones or EKG machines, into Swerve and moving patient data through the mesh network using peer-to-peer Swerve technology to move a patient’s data from one Swerve to another. Swerve can be carried on the drones themselves, or other moving vehicles, including Jeeps and helicopters.

If our experiments are successful, we will empower more civilians to get involved with NGO humanitarian aid efforts by equipping them with the means to provide better care during the acute phase of disaster relief without requiring specialized military equipment or training.

If you'd like to be involved with us and several other companies from the public and private sectors to continue exploring post-disaster patient data tracking please contact us at info@swervelogic.com.
Moreover, this advance has the potential to connect medical experts to rescue workers to offer differential diagnoses or treatments from halfway around the world and through austere conditions using Swerve, mobile devices available in the disaster area, ad hoc mesh networks, and drones.
Let’s break it down.

Ad hoc mesh networks provide basic infrastructure for connectivity during emergency situations by establishing temporary cell towers in drones equipped with cell technology. These drones connect to one another and other hot spots to create the mesh network.