Smartphone is saving lives on Langeland

The purpose of the Langeland project is to save lives by shortening the response time for an emergency call to under 5 minutes.

Langeland is a 52 km long island in the middle of Denmark with long distance to the nearest hospital and typically long response times for the ambulance services.

The shorter response time is made possible by developing a smartphone alerting application and a network of publicly available and managed AED’s that can be used by the volunteer Community First Responders and CPR trained bystanders from the Langeland AED Association.

There are currently more than 200 trained volunteer Community First Responders and CPR trained bystanders and total 93 AED’s on the Langeland Island. The AED’s are always available and there are max two kilometers from a citizen to a defibrillator.

When there is an emergency 112 call made to the ambulance services on the Langeland Island, the central dispatch center can in addition to alerting the ambulance services also alarm the nearby volunteer Community First Responders and CPR trained bystanders that are ready to move out as soon as they receive the alarm.

The intelligent solution locates the 9 Community First Responders and CPR trained bystanders who are geographically closest to the scene of the accident, and sends them an alarm.

The 3 persons who accept the alarm, and who are closest to the scene of the accident receive directions and a description of the task, for example. “Get the AED and take it to the scene of the emergency” and “go straight to the scene of the emergency”.

This way the response time is reduced and ensures that help is on-site quickly.

Since 2012, the Langeland first responder group has been using the FirstAED technology, the response time has been reduced with more than 50% to around 4 minutes.

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