How Drones Are Bringing Emergency Services to Remote Places
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Sometimes getting aid where it's needed most is chAllenging. Supply lines aren't always smooth or efficient. Roads can be Sparked or poorly maintained, so emergency services might need to get off the ground and into the air.

Helicopters are phenomenal tools, great emergency response, but they require a pilot. They are expensive to procure, incredibly expensive to Operate over the term of their lives, and they have some difficult to getting .

in that of tight spaces. That's when lighter. She's the CEO and founder of go arrow, a company aiming to save lives by creating aircraft that don't need pilots and can manual into spaces that are difficult to access. Or as he explains IT.

we are building the world's first, a autonomy enabled emergency response fire high tech aircraft that deliver the people and the goods when there is a crisis, when there is a everyday medical emergency, natural disasters, that's where we come in.

Lighter isn't the only CEO that's looking to autonomous aviation to make medical aid faster and more accessible. It's also an issue keller auto clifton is tackling with his company, zipline.

Zipline Operates the largest and delivery service on earth. We focus on health care, quick commerce and food. Um on the healthcare side, you to give you a quick sense, we serve about forty five million people globally. We delivered seventy five percent of the national blood supply of two different countries fully autonomously. We delivered sixteen million doses of vaccine in the last two years.

Zipline es automated delivery system has powered or won as national blood delivery, and gone is cover nineteen vaccine distribution. They deliver medical supplies and commercial goods across numerous countries, including the U. S.

From the water street journal. This is the future of everything i'm shared the garden burg today or bringing you alex osi s conversation with lighter and renato clifton from W S jays future of everything festival in may. They spoke about how their companies are looking to make medical supplies and aid widely and quickly available. So how does the plan and go arrow make that happen? And what's the flight path they're charting into the future that's after the break?

How do you start to lay the foundation for responsible AI in your organization? Here's fator. Bonnier is IBM consultants global leader for trust or the AI IT .

starts with asking the question, what is the kind of relationship that we ultimately want to have with A I? The purpose of A I is not meant to display human beings that is meant to augment human intelligence. Students, you have a glimmer in your eye about how you are thinking. You might want to use A I. Then asking the questions like what would be required in order to earn people's trust in such a model.

The autonomous aircraft from zip, eline and go arrow aimed to add to the variety of vehicles available to address medical emergencies at the future of everything festival. Back in may, alex began her conversation with gun lighter in keller onoto clifton by looking at the importance of finding the right vehicle for each situation. SHE asked lighter about her company's focus on the need for multiple types of first response aircraft. This conversation has been edited for time and clarity.

Right now, when anyone wants to go buy a car, they can go to a cordial ship and they can get um a sedan where they can get a minivan if they are happening children and they can get a convertible because there are different use cases that are best for each of those different types of technology, in this case car. So too an emergency response right now we're in new york city. Um there is often accidents on on the F, D, R.

The west side highway traffic stops and IT is very difficult an ambuLance to get to people. That's a different type of emergency response than when an earthquake happens or when there's wildfire and wind shift and a firefighter stuck behind of a fire line. So too, it's different for mote island access.

And so just as if we have multiple types of automobile iles, we will need multiple types of first response aircraft and that is what we are doing. In twenty twenty two we had three hundred and eighty natural disasters which affected one hundred and eighty five million people. There were all different types of natural disasters.

Um and so what we are are working on is making sure that both the natural disasters and in everyday medical emergencies, especially in the us, we've got four point five million people living in ambuLance desert. That means that even not a good day when the sun is shining like today, IT still takes twenty five minutes or longer for an emergency response team to meet a person in need. And so that is where we are focusing all of our effort. IT really is the singular mission of building high tech aircraft, high tech technology that saves lives and allows first responders to be first responders because they don't have to also be pilots.

Gero is a company, but it's also a competition. Where does the competition fit into this mission?

Because we realize that not only are we creating new types of aircraft at new autonomy, and we're bringing a number desperate capabilities, right? You have the stability and control systems of the drone world that make previously unavailable configurations fly. You combine that with 3 printing， 3 metal printing， other types of rapid prototyping.

You combine that with the algorithms necessary for state troll. And then because of all of that, um we realized that its new technology, a new industry, deploying emergency response in a whole new way. So we work in lockstep with the F A.

On this. So that IT was not just a one company thing, that what we needed to do was creating ecosystem where we are calling on the best and the brightest. And that is both in the corporate world and government world and universities to come together.

And so we actually, february six, stood on stage with bob peers, who's the head vision at NASA. And together we announced a new competition where we invite teams from around the world, engineers, innovators, entrepreneurs around the world, to join us and create their own types of emergency response. And we help mentor teams because this is a global situation where this technology is needed. We need to bring everybody together to make that happen.

Teller question for you. So you mentioned that the original focus of the plan IT was to living medical supplies, primarily in africa. In recent years, you've expanded into doing deliveries for companies like walmart and sweet Green. How do those two missions, the medical and the commercial, fit together?

I think that we've just listened to customers, I mean, to take rWanda as a little bit of a microcosm. If we launched in twenty sixteen, we original contract there was to deliver blood to twenty one different hospitals.

And for the first nine months, we serve one hospital because this is way harder than we were expected, integrating with the national health care system, integrating with a civil aviation authority, having to provide a service, Operate in all weather, wind and rain, and reliably enough, and Operate twenty four, seven, three, sixty five, in a way that people can depend on with their lives and the lives of their kids. It's just a super, super difficult thing to do. Well, we ended up expanding from there to all twenty one hospitals we originally had told them within the first year.

Then we expanded to one hundred, then we expected to all four hundred and fifty hospitals and health facilities throughout the country. And this before we had launched in many other countries, we sort of said we did IT like because we extended from blood into all medical products for a service we're delivering every medical products, every hospital healthfully in the country. The government said, no, no, you're not done.

Now we want you to do animal health care. Now we want you do animal vaccines. Now we want you to do artificial insemination. Ation products for farmers, which I didn't know anything about, that is a different kind of ai.

And IT turns out really important because getting getting these pragmatically frozen cement straws to farmers impacts childhood military tion, brain stunting, cycles of poverty. Then they started delivering quick commerce products. There is a blind we now partner with a lot of different companies throughout the country.

Health care is really is a bids britton butter today, like ninety percent of our global deliveries, our our health care deliveries and about thirty percent of those are life saving deliveries. But I think it's a natural evolution to see this infrastructure starting to become full on autonomous logistics infrastructure for humanity. That's kind of the big vision. We think somebody he's going to build a new kind of automated logistics system that's going to move things around in the real world as quickly, efficiently as the internet moves information around. And the promise of that is it'll be the first logistics system that serves all people equally.

And in that way, and I believe you have some news to share with us today.

one of the cool of things about the last year, we announced platform to the next generation technology that I had mentioned about a year ago. And since then, a lot of the biggest health systems in the U. S.

Have signed on to use that technology to deliver autonomously from their hospitals and primary care facilities directly to homes, supporting things like home health care, hospital at home, a pharmacy ticals delivery directly at homes as well as reverse logistics for diagnostics. So we announced to partners like cleveland in clinic, memorial hermann, many others, intermountain multiple are michigan medicine. A lot of these awesome held systems across U.

S. And there is one that was missing from that list, which is may clinic. And so really cool to be blow announce today that male clinic is transitioning their overall logistics systems in both mini apple is and in florida over two and autonomous incident zero mission solution in zip lines with something were really I mean, obviously they are one of the leading healthcare brands in the entire world. And so to see them transitioning, to instance, your emission delivery is a pretty exciting sign.

We just heard about how these autonomous aircraft got off the ground, but where are they going next? That's after the break.

Besides your missions, your two companies have another big thing in common, which is you're creating an industry, a road map and infrastructure where none has existed before. Would like each of you to tell me what the hardest st part is of making that happen.

Why are so many reports? It's obviously there's the technology aspect of IT. There is the regulatory aspect of IT, and both our companies are working in in lockstep with the regulatory bodies. And then there's the community acceptance and adoption aspect of IT for both of us that there is a little bit easy because we're talking about public good missions, we're talking about saving lives. And so as an example, when you hear a loud sound, it's bothersome. But if it's an ambuLance of siron, you're less bothered by IT because you know that someone is actually being help those three areas of of the technology, the regulation and then the community acceptance.

Hard part. I hardly know where to begin now. I was mean that blind's been building this kind of infrastructure for ten years now.

Every I I think the hardest part is that there is no one hard part. Everything's hard. That's like why airspace compound are hard.

That's why people say hardware companies are hard. You know, just get to be good at software. You have to be good at electric engineering, designing avion x completely from scratch.

You have to write all the firm work that Operates on that avion x. You have to write all of the low level software, life flight control algorithms, multiple hicor confliction communications architecture, data logging, customer ordering interfaces. We even build the unman traffic management systems that civil vision authorities use.

We provide those now to countries that Operate those systems to manage these fleet of autonation aircraft. I think after all that it's really import also realized like the drone, the aircraft is only fifteen percent of the complexity. Like none of our customers give IT down about drones. All they want is teleportation.

They want to send something from pointing to point me fast if to save someone's life, which is that plans now doing the delivery every forty five seconds globally or three hundred people who raised a billion dollars of venture capitalists, still feels like we're barely scratching the surface. I think the thing that's exciting is that we do things there is this huge transformation coming in automated logistics. Someone is going to go build this.

And we don't think it's going to be ups. It's not going to fedex. It's going to be a company with robotics and software and AI at its core, and we think that is likely to be one of the most valuable companies on earth. And even more exciting, there is like a massive human mission to be served because building a logistics system that can serve everybody equally is going to save a lot of lives and is going to enable a lot of people to have access to economic opportunity who don't have IT today.

I do want to get a little technical for us. I can you say no one cares about drones, but I think maybe some people here do. Um so when you're talking about making these autonomous vehicles that do all these amazing things like that you're talking about, what are some of the factors you're taking into account when you're actually engineering them, deploying them, designing them? Actually, honestly.

the biggest thing that I could say that might be interesting to this group is we had all so many interesting answers that question when we are designing the first system in two thousand thousand and and IT turned out we were complete idiots like we had no idea what we are talking about. We were confused about almost everything. The first party we launched in twenty sixteen, IT, was so desperately hard and we made so many stupid mistakes.

We were very lucky that in the government of rWanda and the ministry of health rWanda, we had a customer who is willing to to be a partner with us and and be very patient. I mean, I almost everything that we did turn out be wrong. And I think in the core things, we were very focused on the vehicle without understanding.

There was this like huge system around custom ordering interfaces on main trafic management systems. Just even how do you build the fulfillment center? Where are going to hold all the medicine? Are you going to track all evenness? And these are questions that smart people would have asked themselves.

We did IT. Um the reality is probably that every start up in this kind of a space requires a certain level of nava, a certain level of, yeah, just being a beginner. I saw this banner in a high school jail zum the other day that said, we do this not because IT is easy, but because we thought that I would be easy.

And I was like, wow, that is the story of that mine. I think what I can say now in knowing is like all it's all in the details of things that sound very boring and are in fact very boring like data logging, safety, reliability testing, uh, overall Operation in wind and snow and lightning ing and rain and dust. Ability to integrate with national health care is believe to get regulatory proof from civilization authorities. These are really the things we had to perfect over ten years of just Operating in the real world. And I don't really think there's any replacing real world experience in terms of figure out how to do this stuff.

When i'm curious about go away earlier talking about to playing these vehicles in natural disasters and IT to help people who are in the sort of dire moments, what are some of the factors you're keeping in in mind here?

When we speak about these go error vehicles, we need them to be robust, autonomy enabled, visual, and we want them also to be rotable and treatable.

Because our vision is that every fire station, every police station, will have an aircraft that is compact in size, right? Once again, helicopter zip mine drone in the center at something compact in size that they can put on a trailer and that they can drive to any kind of situation that they need. And when they can't go anymore, then this aircraft comes up vertically, is deployed and does the rescue.

IT is a combination of both the vision of what IT could be. So really hard details of making things work today. It's the technology.

It's the integration in the airspace. It's the um having these these aircraft work in situations often involving degraded communications. When there's disaster situations, communication methods are are often knocked down. Heavy smoke, heavy wins, all of that. And so we are about being very clear about what our vision is and being incredibly specific in how we execute that vision.

I'm curious for both of you what success looks like for your company.

I saw a study. They came out in university. Pensylvania was studying zipline across all the hospitals who we serve in randa. They found that the rWanda governments been able to reduce maternal mortality of using the service. We now delivered seventy five percent of the national blood supply.

IT turns out to delivering things like packs blood, blood cells, platelets, play corporation pits, oxy tos and other emergency products like logistics is so boring, most we don't really think about IT. But IT turns out if you do logistics well, IT has like huge dividends for a society and for healthcare systems. And I just when I saw that statistics that occurred to me that I had someone told me we were going to be able to reduce maternal mortality by five percent, I would have said, like, that's awesome.

We're doing this. Our society right now is so confused about this ideas like technology making the world a Better place. Where is technology making the world the worst place? In my opinion, technology is technology that depends on the people who are building IT depends on the problems that we focus on trying to solve. And so to me, the definition of success is answering that question conclusively, that like we can use technology to build and abundant future.

I will answer that to the first, is that we'd like to see our aircraft in every municipality, in every place, so that they can actually save lives. And then on a personal note, several years ago, I was at my parents and home, and my father started having chest pains. We call the ambuLance.

AmbuLance came quickly. He went in the ambuLance. I followed behind in my car, and there was a little bit of traffic.

Son was shining. Everything was fine, but there was a little bit of traffic. And I remember saying over and over again in that car, move, please move, please move. And my father got to the hospital. Fine celebrated a big birthday with a surprise party for him a couple month ago. But success, on a personal note for me, looks like having to save everyone from that moment of please move, please move, and having make sure that our loved ones get the the medical help in the emergency help that they need whenever they need IT, as quickly as possible. Because as we all know in those situations, every second counts.

Great when color. Thank you both so much. This is wonderful.

The future of everything is a production of the wall street journal. This episode was produced by me, charlie garden burg. Our fact checker is a partners, Nathan Michael level and jasa fenton, or our sound designers, and wrote our sea music like the show, tell your friends and leave us a five star of you on your favorite platform. Thanks for listening.

Earlier, we discuss what responsible A I looks like in practice. Here's fator point energy from IBM consulting, again, on why that begins with data.

My favorite definition, the work date up. It's an effect of the common experience. A I is like a mirror that reflects our biases back towards us.

But we have to be brave enough, an introspective enough, to look into the mirror and decide, does this reflection actually alive to my organization? values? If IT allies become parents about why did you pick data that you did? If IT doesn't a line that when you know you needed to change .

your entire approach, learn more about IBM artificial intelligence consulting services and IBM dot com flash consulting.