Nowadays, 88% of victims of out-of-hospital cardiac arrest do not survive. However, immediate CPR can double or triple their chances of survival.
But hey, what is CPR?
CPR – or Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation – is an emergency lifesaving procedure performed when the heart stops beating. CPR can keep oxygenated blood flowing to the brain and other vital organs until more definitive medical treatment can restore a normal heart rhythm. Learn more
1 Is there anything that could harm me?
2 Is the victim responsive?
3 Call for help! Phone 112 and ask for an AED!
4 Is the victim breathing normally?
5 Press hard and fast at the center of the chest 30 times at the rythm of ‘Staying Alive’.
6 Give 2 rescue breaths. Look for the victim’s chest to rise. Repeat the 30:2 cycle.
7 Interrupt CPR if you get access to an AED. Turn it on and follow the commands.
8 Do not stop CPR! The ambulance is on its way!
“There is nothing more live-saving than an educated community.”
What are the barriers to get more people capable of providing effective CPR?
Identifcation of abnormal breathing
In Norway, the decision to start CPR is made by the EMS phone dispatcher in 80% of cardiac arrest events.
This shows that bystanders hesitate to act in these events, likely delaying the start of CPR. This is currently not approached in current training sessions.
Somniferous learning experience
Current courses are more than 3 hours long and have a high load of theory, making students struggle to engage with the course and as a consequence not learning effectively.
Skill maintenance strategies
Currently, 70% of trained people in CPR cannot perform correctly 3 months after the training. There is a need to help students practice more frequently to help them remember CPR for longer.
Troublesome training equipment
Maintenance, delivery to training location, and preparation of the equipment is a complex task, which makes an impact on the learning outcomes of the participants and on the instructors experience.
How might we improve the CPR training experience in order to help more people provide effective CPR?
Vivi
An ecosystem of products to enable effortless, frequent, and contextual learning sessions to help companies’ employees maintain their CPR skills.
Vivi consists of a new mannequin, an interactive app, and a service to ensure more frequent, and relevant training at the workplace. Vivi helps CPR training companies organize self-guided recurrent training sessions efficiently with clients by sending self-led training equipment on-site.
Easy accessibility to more frequent CPR training
A subscription-based service facilitates the tasks of Corporations to set up more frequent refresher training sessions. BoostCPR reminds HR departments or safety managers a few months after the initial training and helps them find suitable training times for their colleagues and get the equipment delivered in a time-efficient way.
Facilitating self-guided and short training sessions
Vivi facilitates self-guided, short training sessions. The participants use a web application on their phones that will guide them through, with no need for external instructors.
Practice adapted to every learner
An AI 911 dispatcher adapts to every participant’s skill level depending on what they remember, giving ongoing audio feedback to improve their performance.
Is she breathing?
Vivi challenges participants using different scenarios, helping students identify commonly misleading cardiac arrest signs such as agonal breathing, helping them become more confident in communication with the emergency phone dispatcher.
Space saving equipment
Optimizing the space when transporting several mannequins can save huge expenses for training companies. Vivi’s chest compresses by 50% to fit more mannequins per bag, and quickly self-inflate using an intuitive air valve.
Now, the nitty- gritty.
During the research and ideation process, I conducted several activites to discover the main problems to solve, the main headaches from stakeholders, explore different solutions to the problem and to get feedback from experts in the field.
Contextual immersion
How difficult is teaching CPR? How do clients perceive the CPR training experience nowadays? How do different types of learners engage in the class? Questions such as these were explored during the initial phase to provide powerful insights to the ideation and development phases.
Prototyping and assessing the value proposition for new experiences
Setting up skill maintenance sessions can be an extremely cumbersome experience. I explored different dissemination models that would enable a more time-effcient course. By first evaluating and concluding that a non-professional could conduct a short and assisted CPR session, I started conversations together with some probes with stakeholders to evaluate the value proposition of this new experience.
“Although I agree that this approach would help spread the word better than now, letting these ambassadors teach would affect our business.”
Having these conversations, helped me create a new experience that understands and takes advantage of the existing (and new!) fleet of manikins, capturing new revenue models for training centers and Laerdal Medical.
Prototyping the experience
How can the course participant be self-guided and assisted through a cardiac arrest scenario? How can they assess whether the victim is breathing normally? There is no other answer than using quick paper and digital mockups, conducting user tests, and gathering feedback.
“It helped me a lot to hear the 911 dispatcher giving me voice feedback and see how does abnormal breathing look like.”
Creating a manikin that supports the new use model
What is a realistic enough manikin to teach the compressions and ventilations? How can it be at the same compact and time-saving, so it can be sent around the city by the training center and intuitively set up by the client’s safety manager?
