There are few places we go these days where we’re not being watched — and if not by security cameras or satellite, by drones belonging to neighbors or even teen afficionados.

Drones were one of the most popular gifts given this holiday season — and kids, by the way, weren’t the only ones asking for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). The views these devices can provide of events and scenes have a growing number of families, outdoor enthusiasts, news outlets, photographers and even businesses grabbing the remote. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) reported twice as many drones would be sold in 2016 as in the previous year, numbering 2.5 million.

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Hospitals, however, may be among the next major buyers.

Possibilities for Medicine
While the capabilities of drones are still being realized, researchers at Johns Hopkins Medicine recently figured out how to keep blood, medications and vaccines consistently cool during drone flights.

Pathologist and director of the Hopkins Bayview Medical Center’s clinical laboratories, Dr. Timothy Amukele, spent nearly 18 months with a team perfecting the refrigeration process.

If he can get approval from neighbors and the FAA, he hopes to begin sending lab samples and other materials between the Bayview hospital campus in Baltimore and Johns Hopkins Hospital, which is less than three miles away.

“Remotely piloted drones are an effective, safe and timely way to quickly get blood products to remote accident or natural catastrophe sites,” said one researcher.

Amukele ultimately hopes the findings “add to evidence that remotely piloted drones are an effective, safe and timely way to quickly get blood products to remote accident or natural catastrophe sites, or other time-sensitive destinations,” Hopkins Medicine stated in a release.

“For rural areas that lack access to nearby clinics, or that may lack the infrastructure for collecting blood products or transporting them on their own, drones can provide that access,” Amukele said.

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While the risks of using drones are still being assessed, other health care providers are looking to the technology to solve some critical problems. Check out the tweet below. While it may be an ad, is this a scenario that could soon be possible?

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Blood, specifically, is expensive and it expires, said Cornelius A. Thiels, D.O., a general surgery resident at Mayo Clinic’s campus in Rochester, Minnesota. He believes the more likely scenario, at least initially, will be that drones will “eventually be used to transport blood products to critical access hospitals, mass casualty scenes and even offshore ships with seriously injured passengers,” Mayo Clinic reported.

He added that the ability of UAVs to travel over closed roads and rugged terrain without risk to a flight crew seems to make them ideal for use in disaster areas.