China’s Air Force builds drone that shoots painkiller darts at wounded soldiers

A Chinese military medical school has just developed a UAV that could remotely administer medicine, helping treat injured soldiers on the front lines without putting medical personnel at risk. According to Chinese mouthpiece Global Times, the Air Force Medical University built the first casualty-search drone for the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) that fires darts loaded with painkillers to help ease the pain of wounded personnel.

“We have developed the military’s first casualty-search drone and have also made some breakthroughs in treatment. For example, we can use drones to inject medication into wounded personnel from a considerable distance,” Air Force Medical University representative Wang Jianqi told the publication. “Wherever our drone can fly, we can deliver life-saving emergency medication into a wounded person’s muscle, buying valuable time for treatment.”

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine saw the widespread use of drones on the frontline, primarily for search-and-destroy and reconnaissance missions. However, the four-year escalation of the 12-year war has seen the creative implementations of these units — from jam-proof fiber optic drones to the use of heavy-lift hexacopters for medical evacuation. Now, drones-as-first-responders are being developed for civilian use, including firefighting drones, camera response drones, and even “Campus Guardian Angel” drones designed to neutralize school shooters.

However, China's air-ground treatment drone remains in the experimental stage, says Wang. After all, you can’t just administer medication without assessing the patient’s vital signs and their injuries. It’s also difficult or even impossible to load an incapacitated soldier without external assistance. Still, the deployment of medical UAVs would help with battlefield medicine, which has developed the concept of the “golden hour,” which suggests that wounded personnel treated within the first hour have the greatest chance of survival.

Although battlefield medicine was in use since the 1800s, especially during Napoleon’s invasion of Russia and the American Civil War, helicopter medevacs were first deployed during World War 2 in Burma and the Philippines. The Korean War saw the introduction of MASH — Mobile Army Surgical Hospital — units that brought forward treatment units closer to the frontline.

This, combined with the widespread use of UH-1 Hueys during the Vietnam War to evacuate wounded soldiers from the front lines, sometimes while under enemy fire, has greatly increased the survival rate among wounded soldiers. Today, helicopter and ground medevacs are common among military forces, with drone treatment and evacuation now being experimented with in both the frontlines of Ukraine and military medical universities in China.

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