Deutsche Telekom has announced a partnership with the university of Siegen to cooperate on the research project Kodrona, which stands for Cooperative drone technology for medical applications, in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia. The projects aims to make drone flights available for medical logistic operations. Deutsche Telekom will supply a new type of campus network that will enable the drones to be controlled remotely. The campus will enable communications between the drones and control centre over LTE networks using existing antennas.
Three hospitals, the University and the city of Siegen plus Deutsche Telekom will work together with a drone manufacturer and a control room specialist on a transport system that can, for the first time, get used for medical purposes. This also includes the implementation of collision-free cooperative air traffic for transporting laboratory samples or other medical material between the hospitals.
In the first phase of the pilot project, which is set to start at the beginning of 2021, drones will fly between the DRK children’s hospital and the district hospital in Siegen on a approximately 2.5 km flight. The drones will transport the medical laboratory samples of young patients to the central laboratory in order to make test results available to doctors faster. In the long term, a fully autonomous shuttle service between the DRK children’s hospital and the district hospital in Siegen will become a regular operation.