DRONA: A Novel Design of a Drone for Search and Rescue Operations

This paper presents a novel quadcopter drone that utilizes modular design to aid in search-and-rescue operations. The drone consists of three modules. The first module is a wireless portable patient monitoring system. The module records vital signs such as oxygen saturation, heart rate, electrocardiogram, and body temperature. The module is wireless, and it can fit around the user's finger. The second module reads environmental measurements such as the ambient temperature, humidity, and GPS coordinates. The third module consists of a mini thermal camera that captures a signature of the body temperature. This feature is crucial in search-and-rescue operations to locate trapped people under destruction or lost in the wilderness. A two-way video and audio-conferencing module provides a communication channel between the medics and patients remotely. The drone uploads the data to a cloud server in real-time mode. All the data captured by the drone are accessible via a phone application and on any computer or a custom hand-held Raspberry Pi. The results showed that the drone was able to capture in real-time the vital signs, thermal imaging, video-audio communications, and as well as weather environmental measurements. A friendly user interface program renders all transmitted data. Future work will include introducing advanced image processing and pattern recognition techniques to automatically detect and identify objects.