When Bobby Healy founded Manna Air Delivery  in 2018, he had little idea of who his first customer would end up being, or the extreme conditions that would lead to the partnership.

Covid-19, which sent the world into lockdown in 2020, created a new and urgent use case for drone delivery: getting medicines to people in remote areas with minimal human contact.

“Our first customer partner became the Health Service Executive (HSE), Ireland’s national health service, and we were delivering prescription medicine there in rural areas,” Healy said. “[We had] technology that can deliver things hands-free, and they were looking for innovation to say, ‘How do we move critical goods around?’”

For Manna, which intended to target the food delivery market, delivering medicines created a new layer of regulatory challenges on top of the airspace safety requirements it was already working on.

“We’re regulated by aviation regulators, but there’s a whole other world of clinical regulation that comes in around the ‘chain of control’, keeping medicines at the right temperature,” Healy said. “We decided to partner with other companies to do the clinical chain of control side, and all we need to provide is the box that they put their box into.”

Working through these challenges wasn’t easy, but Healy said that the experience showed the impact that drone delivery can make.

“Elderly patients that couldn’t leave their houses swore by it,” he told The Infinite Loop. “They were able to get a video consultation with their doctor, the doctor was able to issue a prescription electronically to the local pharmacy. We were able to fly it to the house, so there was zero human contact and zero need to leave the house.”

Beyond delivering potentially life-saving medicines, Healy said that working with the HSE served as a proof of concept for the company in another way.

“We were able to get people there in their 80s to adopt a technology like this, which speaks volumes,” he said. “It's not just young people and techies adopting this technology, because it's so easy to use and it's so meaningful for people that are incapacitated or have mobility issues.”

For more on the tech and social issues facing companies like Manna Air Delivery, read the full article here on The Infinite Loop.

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