A little more than a year ago I posted about the San Ramon Valley Fire Protection District app that summoned CPR trained citizens to possible sudden cardiac arrest victims. Since that time the app has been broken away to be developed further making it more available far and wide by the newly established PulsePoint Foundation. The Foundation recently made an Android version of the app available and plan on rolling the app out to the community of San Jose sometime in mid-February.
One of the challenges for cities and regions looking to implement the app is having an accurate map of the available AEDs in their area. The University of Pennsylvania has a solution for the city of Philadelphia in the MyHeartMap Challenge. Here are the three ways you can participate:
- Find and photograph the most AEDs in Philadelphia County within four weeks and win the Grand Prize of $10,000
- Find and photograph a “Golden” AED first and you can win $50
- Although there is no monetary reward, you can submit addresses of locations without AEDs that probably should have AEDs
By merging the data gathered from MyHeartMap with the functionality of PulsePoint, Philadelphia can be the first urban center with a citizen corps ready to respond to a sudden cardiac arrest with an AED in hand.
Crowd sourcing information for responders is not something new. During the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill there were apps making it possible for citizens to report oil along the coastline using similar methods. Of course, the quality of the content you get out will depend on the quality of the content that gets put in, which is why the University of Pennsylvania will be doing confirmation visits to the sites submitted.
The MyHeartMap app is available for both Android and iOS
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