The beauty - or fear - inspired by drones is in the eyes of the beholder. Drones are being used for a wide range of purposes, whether for the latest social media campaign or to deliver medicines to remote areas. It can be difficult to tell at first sight what a drone is being used for and what the intentions of the drone pilot are. If you saw or heard a drone flying over your backyard, what would your first thought be? Perhaps you would find it a bit annoying, perhaps you shrug it off and move on with your day. Now imagine you lived in Ukraine, Australia, Malawi or Colombia. Would this change how you would react?

It can be difficult to gauge how a community would feel about a drone flying over their neighbourhood. This puts researchers wanting to use drones for scientific research in a difficult position. Drones can be used to collect valuable data about the environment that could ultimately benefit the people living there. For example, drones can be mounted with equipment to measure air quality and drone images of the environment can be used in the prediction of disease risk over an area. How can researchers communicate their good intent to the community when their scientific drone looks like any other drone? What actions should researchers take to respectfully engage with communities to address potential concerns they have about drone research?

Researchers start thinking about these types of questions early on in the study design process. An important milestone for every research project involving interactions with human participants or communities is to obtain ethical approval. This involves an ethics committee appointed by a research institution to review whether the study protocol is in line with local and international ethical guidelines. It is also part of the ethics committee's job to monitor studies after they have been approved. When a new technology such as drones makes its way into scientific research, these guidelines will need to be updated. This is to both safeguard the community in which research is being conducted and support researchers in developing their study protocols. 

The HARMONIZE project brings together infectious disease data with data on possible risk factors from a great variety of sources and makes sure the datasets are aligned to the needs of public health workers and researchers. As part of this effort, our team is conducting field campaigns with drones in Colombia, Peru, Brazil and the Dominican Republic to collect land-use imagery. Drones can uniquely complement existing satellite sources of land use data due to their capability of recording very high-resolution data at a moment’s notice, even on cloudy days. This makes them a great tool for public health research, but what are the best practices when getting ready for a field campaign?

 A member of the HARMONIZE team flies a drone as part of the field campaign in Peru.

To answer any doubts researchers may have about using drones in the field, the HARMONIZE team is conducting a literature review on the use of drones within environment and health research. This takes into account the three perspectives of main stakeholders that are involved in drone research: community members, researchers, and institutions issuing ethical guidance. This will help us identify communities' concerns about drone research, describe how researchers organise their drone research, and what ethical guidance specific to drones is available to researchers. This will allow us to determine which ethical concerns and examples of good ethical practice are mentioned across all three groups, and which themes are specific to just one or two groups. More details on the methods can be found in our study protocol, for which we are currently screening literature to select the studies we want to analyse in more detail. The results from this review will be translated into practical guidance for researchers and research institutions. This will hopefully lead to study designs and respectful research practices that promote trust between researchers and the communities they work with.