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First aid drone for outdoor sports activities

Abstract:

Practicing sports in the outdoors as a way to reduce stress levels, improve health and even as an incentive to enhance social relations, has encouraged more and more people to leave the sedentary lifestyle to perform activities like walking, jogging, hiking, biking, among others. This trend of practicing outdoor sport activities also was driven by new technological gadgets (e.g., smartphone whit special apps, fitness trackers and smartwatches) since they allow tracking all the workout performance values (e.g., pace, speed, distance, duration), vita parameters and signals (e.g., heart rate, temperature and calories burned) and also allow following the exercise route (e.g., geographic coordinates). During outdoors sports activities, independently if these are amateur or professional, the sportsman can suffer accidents, which can result in body injuries, or an unexpected health problem (e.g., heart attack, heatstroke and dehydration) that can limit its mobility or even its conscious state. When this happens, an emergency service should be activated. This is the more important the more remote is the site of the emergency. A solution envisaged to provide emergency care as soon as possible in cross-country sports competitions, even when the land topography is very rough, is proposed in this paper. The base idea is to use a drone that carries a first aid kit (bandages, alcohol, cotton, gauze, water, and other emergency and survival products) and has real-time audio and video communications capabilities.