Meet the startup digitising battlefield medicine The AO is combining wearable sensors, digital patient records and frontline data to improve casualty evacuation in Ukraine and beyond.
Drone warfare has fundamentally changed battlefield medicine. During four medical rotations with the Hospitallers Medical Battalion in Ukraine's Donetsk Oblast, startup founder and volunteer medic Howard Hunt (callsign Hunter) saw firsthand how the proliferation of drones has pushed casualty evacuation further from the frontline.
Medical teams can no longer safely drive directly to wounded soldiers during daylight hours. Instead, casualties are stabilised by combat medics before being transported after dark to Casualty Collection Points, where evacuation crews collect multiple patients simultaneously. This shift has exposed the limitations of a medical evacuation system that still relies heavily on manual processes.
Inside moving ambulances, medics caring for several critically injured soldiers must measure blood pressure with a cuff, count respirations manually and complete paper-based Tactical Combat Casualty Care (TCCC) cards while travelling over damaged roads. Those handwritten records accompany the patient through successive stages of care before eventually being entered into hospital systems, introducing delays, transcription errors and gaps in patient data. As casualty numbers increase, these analogue workflows become increasingly difficult to manage.
