VCADS

This exciting workshop will be held March 5-8, 2018 at the Indian Institute of Science in Bengaluru, India.

Background and Objectives

Emergency medical situations can occur at any time, and often do occur on the road in congested urban areas, or in rural areas which may not have easy and fast access to emergency medical personnel. This is especially true in urban areas in rapidly developing India due to current traffic conditions. The recent advancements in geospatial localization and optimization have been quite dramatic and drone technology is being evaluated by technology companies for delivery of commercial goods. That is indeed interesting and could be lucrative for the companies; however, application of such technology for alleviating and responding to road traffic congestion and accidents and medical response to rural or congested urban situations could be much more impactful and result in tremendous savings of human lives and morbidity. Another important and potential application of drone technology is transportation of vital organs, whose timely delivery to hospitals (where it is required) is prevented by heavy traffic in metro cities. When implemented, such a system could be transformative changing the emergency medical landscape in India forever and saving thousands of lives.

To address this challenge, we propose a workshop to bring together a highly interdisciplinary team of experts from USA and India. Expertise areas to be represented include systems engineering and optimization, unmanned aerial technology (and various sub-disciplines such as navigation, control, aerodynamics, etc.), emergency and critical care medicine, major Indian Emergency Response Systems, and the rural health mission and ministry of health in India.

Design Division, Aeronautical Society of India and VCADS, Villanova University, USA are the coordinating partners of this joint workshop and aim to bring together specific interest groups from academic, private and government institutions, both in India and the US.

As the first priority, the outcome of the workshop will be to obtain clarity on the specific R&D on Emergency Medical Delivery system integrating UAVs (EMeDS) that needs to be done with short and long term goals and metrics for success. A secondary objective will be to form interdisciplinary working groups to follow upon EMeDS platform/process design and development activities in India and connect these efforts with similar groups and entities in USA through future joint collaborations.

Registration

Participation in the workshop is by invitation. Travel support for invited speakers and local accommodation for speakers and students/researchers participating in the group meetings will be covered through funding support from IUSSTF. Limited industry participation will be arranged depending on availability of funding support.

Workshop Organizing Committee

C. 'Nat' Nataraj, PhD (US Coordinator), Villanova University, Villanova, USA
Kota Harinarayana, PhD (Indian Coordinator), Aeronautical Society of India, Bengaluru, India
Vinay Nadkarni, MD, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, USA
Upendranath Vanam, PhD, National Aerospace Laboratories, Bengaluru, India
B. Gurumoorthy, PhD, Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, India
Ramana Rao, MD, GVK Emergency Management and Research Institute, Hyderabad, India
K. Ramachandra, PhD, Director, National Design & Research Forum, India
Rakesh Kumar, Treasurer, Design Division, Aeronautical Society of India

Contact Information

Workshop related e-mails should be sent to emeds.workshop@gmail.com with a copy to either of the coordinators (Dr. Nataraj or Dr. Kota). Further details and updates will be posted on the workshop website, i.e., this page.