Researchers are looking into drone delivery as a method to efficiently deliver testing kits while limiting contact between individuals.
New COVID-19 test distribution method uses drones to deliver home test kits to people who suspect they have COVID-19, reveal researchers at the Texas A&M University School of Public Health.
Benefits of Home Test Kits
The //coronavirus pandemic showed that a key part of controlling the spread of a contagious disease is to quickly and accurately identify who has been infected. This allows for distancing and quarantining of infectious people to reduce transmission. At the same time, it is important to limit contact between people who need to be tested, others seeking diagnosis and health care workers administering tests.‘Researchers are looking into drone delivery as a method to efficiently deliver testing kits while limiting contact between individuals.’
Home test kits have made it possible for people to get an accurate diagnosis without coming into contact with others but getting tests to people who need them can be a challenge, something drone deliveries could overcome.COVID-19 diagnostic tests that use a polymerase chain reaction (PCR) technique are highly accurate but take hours to process, and it can sometimes take days for patients to get results back. In contrast, faster antigen-based tests can give results in as little as 15 to 30 minutes.
Home antigen test kits allow people who suspect they may have COVID-19 to test themselves at home, which can limit exposure to other patients at testing sites as well as health care workers administering tests. Getting faster results while minimizing exposure to other people is one way to further limit the spread of the disease.
Drones to Deliver COVID-19 Tests
In a new article published in the Journal of Intelligent and Robotic Systems, Murray Côté, associate professor at the Texas A&M School of Public Health, and colleagues from the University of Houston developed a new technique for scheduling the delivery of COVID-19 diagnostic tests using a truck to dispatch the drones and drones to deliver the tests. The researchers tested various scenarios to better understand the capability of their approach.Côté and colleagues’ approach examine their problem as separate truck and drone components. First, they optimize the truck schedule to minimize travel distance and then focus on minimizing drone delivery time.
- The first stage of their proposed method works to find a feasible set of truck and drone routes.
- The second stage uses a heuristic algorithm that tries different combinations of routes to find improvements to their initial solution.
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Their study demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed delivery scheduling method, which could also be used in other applications such as testing other infectious diseases like influenza.
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Another future direction the researchers note is investigating how driving restrictions like speed limits, traffic lights and traffic congestion influence truck and drone scheduling methods.
Source-Eurekalert