The ocean is very large. A person in it is very small.
Somewhere in the wide blue of the Kwajalein lagoon, a man sits alone on an old wreckage, waiting for his distress signals to be picked up. Even though this was only an exercise — the problem was real enough. The ocean is vast, the water is bright, time is running down, and a single person is very, very small.
This August 2026, KALGOV (Kwajalein Atoll Local Government) and Pacific ALLIES (Alliance Linking Leaders in Education and the Services) performed a telehealth drone search-and-rescue demonstration at Kwajalein Atoll, concluding with a mock telehealth physical exam using the VSee Telemedicine Kit and software.
Thes cenario is just one of the reasons that KALGOV and Pacific ALLIES, a joint civil-military program that brings US Coast Guard Academy (USCGA) students and cadets to research climate, ecology, and national security in the Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI)— is working with VSee to build triphibious telehealth medical drone networks in the Pacific.
Watch the search and rescue mission:
A drone finds a man. A satellite link finds a doctor.
Working with KALGOV disaster coordinator, Abon Arelong (the drone pilot), and local first responders, the search-and-rescue team first tried to locate the “casualty” using traditional search methods, but without success. Then they launched the drone, which quickly located the distress signal and provided them with the correct coordinates.
Once the boat reached the casualty, the crew powered up a satellite-linked VSee telemedicine kit. Within minutes three clinicians were on the call: one in Hawaii, one in Washington state, one in Palau, spread across three time zones, observing the “rescued patient”.
This exercise proved two things:
- the superior speed and facility with which a drone could locate a missing or downed person over a wide expanse of ocean.
- the advantages and viability of telehealth on a rescue mission — whether the connection comes up at all on a small boat, on battery, over satellite, first time, operated by people whose job is search and rescue rather than IT.
Why the drone and telehealth imperative
The need for these technologies in the Pacific is not theoretical.
In March 2025, a Marshallese medical team on its way to an outer island community was lost at sea. For a week, US Navy, US Coast Guard and Marshallese crews ran more than sixteen searches — nearly 82 hours — across 52,931 square nautical miles, an area larger than Washington state. Despite their best efforts, no one was ever found.
Across the RMI, the distance between a patient and a specialist is measured in boat hours and flight days. Usually by the time medical help is accessible, the clinical decision that mattered has usually already been made by whoever happened to be standing there.
Dr. Gregg Nakano, executive director of Pacific Allies points out, “Imagine if that capability had instead been put in the hands of local communities: long-range search-and-rescue drones able to find boats at sea. Or, better yet, satellite-connected telehealth X-ray machines flown directly to the community that needed them. That is the vision we are building with VSee.”
He emphasizes, “Life is priceless. Everything else can be bought. Who knows the waters better than the people who live in them?
The people who will be flying
The effort is not just to deploy the technology, but to sustain it at the local level. At Kwajalein’s Spartan Marine Science Summer Camp, Marshallese students aged 9 to 16 spent two weeks this July on drone operations, AI, Google Earth mapping, marine science and traditional Marshallese sailing. While equipment flown in by visitors might help for a week, equipment operated by people who live on the water closes distance gaps permanently. Camp counselors USCGA cadets Liliana Feyk and Taylor Schnatz affirm that students are learning skills for a better future from reducing pollution, identifying illegal fishing to assisting with search and rescue efforts (The Kwajalein Hourglass Vol. 66, #30)
The camp has run since 2017. Next July marks the tenth anniversary of the partnership behind it — and the hope is that the students learning to fly drones today will be the ones to fly these missions in the future.
Building telehealth and drone capability
This is not the first time VSee has been part of such a demonstration. In 2024, KALGOV, the Kwajalein Atoll Sustainability Laboratory (KASL), the US Coast Guard Academy and the US Office of Naval Research ran a Starlink-connected telehealth exam aboard a boat ambulance, with physicians observing from three US locations (read that story). The same problem, but with a different vehicle.
In 2025, Pacific ALLIES students and members of the Hawaii National Guard conducted HADR (Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Relief) training with Kwajalein local first responders and demonstrated transporting VSee telehealth equipment by drone from land to a moving boat at sea.
Next July
A casualty evacuation demonstration is scheduled for 12–24 July 2027. Finding a lost person is the first problem. Reaching them is the second, and next year the payload stops being equipment and becomes a person.
Dr. Nakano shares, “Pacific Allies is designed to do three things: improve quality of life on Kwajalein today, extend the habitability of Kwajalein tomorrow, and empower Marshallese kids to survive and thrive when they are forced to leave their homelands in the next twenty or thirty years.
By putting satellite-linked telehealth into the hands of the next generation of Marshallese leaders, VSee is giving infants, mothers and elders on remote outer islands access to healthcare that was unimaginable ten years ago. And the kids who learn by doing for communities in Kwajalein, Jaluit and Ailinglaplap will become the CEOs of telehealth companies in Guam, Spokane and Saipan.”
Next July will show whether the second problem can be solved as cleanly as the first. The people who will be flying by then are, for now, still in school.
Watch the demonstration · See the 2025 medical delivery · Read the 2024 story
