Emergency Response in the Community and Medical Shareconomies
localresponder.org is an initiative to implement "shareconomies" in the field of first aid and emergency medicine, allowing people to share knowledge, resources and experience. Medical Shareconomies are community- or workplace-based first responder networks, which use collective purchasing power to buy and share emergency equipment, such as defibrillators.
localresponder.org provides such medical shareconomies with the kind of tools needed to build and maintain a local emergency response community. Our platform offers features for club management such as membership and fee management, online votes and discussion groups, investment planning, key administration, blogs and newsletters.
The key element of our portal is the alert server. It is able to alert all first responders nearby within seconds, using modern techniques such as geopositioning and text-to-speech. We can also coordinate the ongoing training of community members in first aid and basic life support.
Our project focuses primarily on prevention of deaths due to Sudden Cardiac Arrest. Sudden Cardiac Arrest is a major killer and with a death toll far greater than that of cancer and other major diseases combined. Sudden Cardiac Arrest happens without warning and is deadly without immediate effective treatment in the form of CPR and defibrillation.
The delivery of effective help within the first minutes after the incident significantly increases the survival rates and helps prevent complications. Without any treatment, survival rates decline by about 7-10 % per minute.
We believe that facilitating public access to defibrillation at a community level will cut the time to defibrillation to a few minutes and make a life-saving difference. It is our aim to transform the first aid that is available to our users in a manner that is safe, user-friendly and cost-effective.
