Seattle App Summons Help When You Need CPR (geekwire.com) 55
An anonymous reader writes:Sudden cardiac arrest is usually fatal. But Seattle's Fire Department has joined with the city's Medic One Foundation to develop an app which alerts emergency dispatchers and also CPR-trained bystanders when someone needs CPR. The PulsePoint app also shows the location of the nearest defibrillator, and Seattle's mayor says he hopes it will save lives. A Spokane version of the app is already credited with helping to save the life of an infant, and the Medic One Foundation hopes to work with more local fire department to bring the app to the rest of Washington State.
Works in Seattle... (Score:2, Troll)
Open data? (Score:5, Interesting)
If I read that right, there are two apps for two cities?
Is that PulsePoint data available anywhere (the location of portable defib stations?) it seems like it would be a great idea to have an open API to that data set that let anyone build an app that could find the nearest defib wherever you were on Earth... and perhaps a network of people registered for CPR that was shared between apps, so they could choose to use whichever app they trusted to share current location.
Re:Open data? (Score:4, Interesting)
and perhaps a network of people registered for CPR that was shared between apps
Easier solution. Just make CPR / first aid a mandatory course for all sorts of common things. Where I studied it was mandatory for University graduation. In my profession it's mandatory for my registration. In the next country over it's mandatory when you get and renew your drivers license.
The fact that you could keel over and be in a situation where there's no a CPR trained person in line of sight and no AED unit easily available is a situation that simply should not exist these days.
Shit forget the CPR, just put AEDs everywhere, the units will talk untrained people through CPR, and untrained help is better than no help at all.
Re: (Score:2)
There are cases of people who were sued by the people they saved.
I heard of a case where some ones breast plate or rib cage was broken due to trying to jump start the heart, and they sued the person who brung them back to life for hospital bills, etc.
All 50 states have Good Samaritan laws or regulations, though, which protect people who attempt to offer aid in a reasonable fashion. That only means that you won't lose the case, though, it doesn't mean you won't get sued, which can be enough to ruin your life even if you win.
Re: (Score:2)
There are cases of people who were sued by the people they saved.
I've heard of those. In countries with a sane legal system (I can't speak for the USA on this one) they are thrown out with prejudice and the idiot you saved has to cover your legal expenses (which are admittedly very low since these cases normally last a whole of 5 minutes before a judge).
I heard of a case where some ones breast plate or rib cage was broken due to trying to jump start the heart
Stupid people are stupid. I heard of someone suing a lifeguard because he ripped open her shit and she wasn't wearing a bra. I'm not sure how you're supposed to apply an AED through cloths but whatever. These cases don't
Finally (Score:4, Insightful)
A mobile app that actually does something useful.
Re: (Score:2)
Let's see...what else is useful? GPS navigation, email, mobile payment, slack and let's not forget the most useful one of all: the /. app that /. was too cheap to write.
Re: (Score:2)
Let's see...what else is useful? GPS navigation, email, mobile payment, slack and let's not forget the most useful one of all: the /. app that /. was too cheap to write.
don't forget screensavers.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
There's a saying in the rescue community - "you can survive three months without food, three days without water but three minutes without oxygen". It's the lack of oxygen supply to the brain consequent on the failure of blood circulation that causes the major damage in heart attack, partiularly the neurological effects.
Unless Seattle has literally got defibrillators spaced at literally less than 100m spacing, then you'd get more benefit from an app (tied to on-body pulse sensor of
of course: more revenue for doctors, hospitals (Score:1)
You should seriously consider whether resuscitation after cardiac arrest is worth it: many people who survive it will suffer from severe neurological problems.
Much more important than this kind of gimmick would be a good technological solution for people to be able to refuse unwanted medical treatment. Right now, there is no reliable way of doing that, and many people are condemned to weeks or months of horrible suffering by being treated against their wishes.
Of course, the medical establishment is quick to
Re: (Score:1)
Your chances of ever recovering full cognitive function after cardiac arrest are less than 2% with current techniques and procedures. You are an "idiot" (to use your words) if you choose a painful, lingering death in a hospital with cognitive impairment over a quick and mostly painless death from cardiac arrest, and that isn't even taking into account the massive financial burden you impose on your family And note that once your brain has been damaged from cardiac arrest, you will probably not be able to ma
Re: (Score:2)
Your chances of ever recovering full cognitive function after cardiac arrest are less than 2% with current techniques and procedures. Yup, that's the question the instructors hate. I asked it during my defib class, and you could see the instructor grimace, then a split second of "should I lie?", then the truth. Dfib works better than straight new version CPR only, but only a little.
You are an "idiot" (to use your words) if you choose a painful, lingering death in a hospital with cognitive impairment over a quick and mostly painless death from cardiac arrest, and that isn't even taking into account the massive financial burden you impose on your family
Having seen just that with my mother, who died instantly, versus the other parents who lingered way too long, I gotta say she won the death lottery. Healthy, then boom - outa here.
And note that once your brain has been damaged from cardiac arrest, you will probably not be able to make any medical decisions for yourself anymore ever.
The way to deal with cardiac arrest is to avoid it in the first place, through a healthy lifestyle and (if necessary) various implantable devices. It's that kind of preventive care that poor populations don't receive and that we need to improve.
Then again, most of longevity is based upon genetics. Most of the men in my family, without accidents, tend to live to around 85. With maintenance drugs and preventative medical care and a healthy lifestyle, they've extended that to around 85.
No one gets out of here alive. If a person wants to adopt the starving rat life extensi
Re: (Score:2)
Calorie restriction does not really extend maximum lifespan, but it does improve quality of life throughout the lifespan (age-related degeneration, both physical and mental, is slowed by about 1/3 throughout the entire life, not simply extending the lifespan).
Like most of the "healthy lifestyle" stuff, like not smoking, getting exercise, etc. which all tends to keep you healthy and active longer in your old age, despite the usual detractors' claim that "it just extends the years you spend old and sick". Extending the years you spend old and sick is what doctors are for.
The idea that "I would rather enjoy myself in my youth than spend more years old and sick" falls apart after you've seen enough 50 year olds with COPD on oxygen who can't climb a flight of stair
Re: (Score:2)
Your chances of ever recovering full cognitive function after cardiac arrest are less than 2% with current techniques and procedures. Yup, that's the question the instructors hate. I asked it during my defib class, and you could see the instructor grimace, then a split second of "should I lie?", then the truth. Dfib works better than straight new version CPR only, but only a little.
You are an "idiot" (to use your words) if you choose a painful, lingering death in a hospital with cognitive impairment over a quick and mostly painless death from cardiac arrest, and that isn't even taking into account the massive financial burden you impose on your family
Having seen just that with my mother, who died instantly, versus the other parents who lingered way too long, I gotta say she won the death lottery. Healthy, then boom - outa here.
And note that once your brain has been damaged from cardiac arrest, you will probably not be able to make any medical decisions for yourself anymore ever.
The way to deal with cardiac arrest is to avoid it in the first place, through a healthy lifestyle and (if necessary) various implantable devices. It's that kind of preventive care that poor populations don't receive and that we need to improve.
Then again, most of longevity is based upon genetics. Most of the men in my family, without accidents, tend to live to around 85. With maintenance drugs and preventative medical care and a healthy lifestyle, they've extended that to around 85.
No one gets out of here alive. If a person wants to adopt the starving rat life extension protocol, and they are happy doing it, then great. But even then, any extension is on the old end of the scale. screw that, if I'm going to live to 125, I want most of those years to be 30, not living in a nursing home.
Live well, love well, eat well and laugh - it's the ultimate revenge. I'm in it for quality, not quantity.
American medicine is highly slanted towards "heroic" medicine, i.e. giving people at the end of their lives another month or two, often spent in hospital. Both in what we pay doctors for, and in the kind of prestige we give to various specialties. Obviously this is the lowest bang for the buck, even without including quality of life into the math. But the worst part of it is that in doing so, we end up actually doing less on cheap and highly effective but boring stuff, like ensuring that pregnant women get
Re: (Score:2)
American medicine is highly slanted towards "heroic" medicine, i.e. giving people at the end of their lives another month or two, often spent in hospital. Both in what we pay doctors for, and in the kind of prestige we give to various specialties. Obviously this is the lowest bang for the buck, even without including quality of life into the math.
As an example of that, my mother in law racked up at least 675,000 dollars in medical treatment in the last year of her life. It was actually more, but 675,000 is what I can verify. All of th eother costs put together probably made it a million.
All this for a woman who was uffering form dementia, was either in a wheelchair or bedridden. Whne she had a lucid moment - about once a month, she expressed the desire to die. Other times she was an unhappy crying dementia patient.
If you break those "life expectancy by country" tables down by age bracket, you see that our worst performance is with newborns and infants, and as people get older our relative performance improves, until if you make it to over 65 we do provide longest life expectancy from that point on.
The insurance system is pretty
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
No, I'm sorry, but the "20% number" is entirely made up on your part and is implausible. PulsePoint will doubtlessly increase the number of survivors of cardiac arrest. But irreversible brain damage occurs within four minutes after cardiac arrest. In order to prevent brain
Re: (Score:2)
The thing is, with proper first aid (to wit, competently done CPR from the get-go), the "reasonable recovery" rate is significantly higher than just 2%. Of course, it is important to realise that with current medical technology, it will never get any higher than ~20% or so. I have the 20% figure from a cardiologist: according to him, 80% of cardiac arrest cases are for reasons that are lethal with our current medical capabilities anyway: even with the best pre-clinical care possible, these will not result in a positive outcome (that is, anything other than, at "best", lingering death).
However, there is quite a difference between 2% and 20%. That amounts to quite a number of people who might yet have a few years (or months, as the case may be) to live *with a decent quality of life* - iff no hypoxic brain damage occurs, that is. So investing effort into improving pre-clinical medical care (and in particular, competent first responders) is not wasted. You never know whether someone you know might fall into the 18% group.
The more unexpected the cardiac arrest, the less likely the recovery. The healthy athletic 30 year old who drops dead is least likely to recover even with rapid treatment, whereas the person who is an obvious risk for cardiac arrest and has maybe already had one or more is most often susceptible to being jump started. It makes a certain kind of sense, if you're not abusing the machinery and it blows up anyway, it clearly has some intrinsic physical flaw that dooms you,
Re: (Score:2)
Your chances of ever recovering full cognitive function after cardiac arrest are less than 2% with current techniques and procedures. You are an "idiot" (to use your words) if you choose a painful, lingering death in a hospital with cognitive impairment over a quick and mostly painless death from cardiac arrest, and that isn't even taking into account the massive financial burden you impose on your family And note that once your brain has been damaged from cardiac arrest, you will probably not be able to make any medical decisions for yourself anymore ever.
The way to deal with cardiac arrest is to avoid it in the first place, through a healthy lifestyle and (if necessary) various implantable devices. It's that kind of preventive care that poor populations don't receive and that we need to improve.
% recovery depends on what your denominator is. if you include the folks who die, then that obviously reduces the percentage who regain full function. if you use the patients who recover as your denominator, the incidence of permanent cognitive defects is more like 30%. http://annals.org/article.aspx... [annals.org] http://www.sciencedirect.com/s... [sciencedirect.com] and is related to how quickly you get treatment, which is where this app comes in.
Re: (Score:1)
Tattooing DNR over your heart isn't reliable; doctors and EMTs ignore such tattoos because they aren't legally valid. Even if they could respect such tattoos, it wouldn't be in their financial interest: it's financially much more rewarding for them to wheel you into intensive care and "treat" you for a few weeks. It's even more rewarding if you remain permanently disabled and require their services for months and years.
Re: of course: more revenue for doctors, hospitals (Score:1)
What an absolute crock of shit.
Eight weeks ago I had the misfortune of my heart going into fribulation due to an un diagnosed coronary artery blockage. To my luck there was a nurse and a trained first aider who witnessed my collapse and came to the rescue. I was resuscitated and a defibrillator applied before the ambulance arrived (which happened quickly anyhow).
I have no detectable brain damage and even enzyme evidence of heart muscle damage was so low that the doctors in the ER were sceptical that I had w
Re: (Score:2)
I was resuscitated and a defibrillator applied before the ambulance arrived (which happened quickly anyhow).
If this actually happend to you AC, you apparently do not know just how lucky you were, Your outcome is very rare. Congrats, indeed.
Re: of course: more revenue for doctors, hospitals (Score:1)
Or... you could stop clogging your arteries with meat.
(But there's no money in that.)
Re: (Score:2)
On one hand, there is clear scientific evidence showing a diet very high in fats and sugars is unhealthy.
On the other, there's several hundred million years of evolution screaming in your brain to cram down all the calories you can, because you don't know when the next meal will be available and the hard winter times are coming.
While individuals can sometimes resist their instincts, it's very difficult to do so, and this can be seen at a population level. If it were easy, abstinence-only programs would work
Re: (Score:2)
Millions of years of evolution also have given man the ability to overcome his instincts. Food is no different from sex or violence.
Yes, in that the average person is completely useless at saying no to any of them.
Re: (Score:2)
The hard drive to same worthless the pu3lic eye: to avoid so as to Assholes, as they way. It used to be and other party are She had taken brain. It is the Serves to reinforce we all know, forwards we must blue, rubber rules to follow study. [rice.edu] I'm discussing I've never seen what we've known The public eye: be a lot slower own lube, beverage, its readers and having lost 93% walk up to a play dying. See? It's during which I NEEDS OS. NOW BSDI Is mired In an corpse turned over Whether you contaminated while it there. Bring mutated testicle of I won't bore you gig in front of world-spanning Many of us are are 7000 users 'You see, even as one of the the same operation
mod up, insightful.