freethinkaa

Have you ever heard of Pulsepoint?? I'm the original developer on that project, and I was curious what an actual 9-1-1 dispatcher thinks of it. Everything I hear is once or twice removed. If you HAVEN'T heard of it, check us out and for sure let us know if this is something your town wants to implement. www.pulsepoint.org << we're non-profit! And saving lives :D

So the way it is implemented is that we write wrappers for existing dispatch systems that allow dispatchers to also post their data to pulsepoint (using a simple REST api). It supports a lot of different kinds of incident types, one of which is 'medical emergency'. The dispatcher has the option to check a "may need cpr" box. Our system, if the address is in a public area (we don't send CPR alerts for residential areas for privacy reasons), will find all of the people around that area who are registered to receive pushes for CPR events, and notify them. If you get such an alert, we later send you a survey via the app and we've collected some cool data from this.

If you're curious to see how many people get notified per CPR app, check out the twitter feed @1000livesaday

For instance, today in San Jose:

CPR Activation for @SJFD at 01:28 PM PST (N 1ST ST); 3 citizen responders just notified. #PulsePointSaves

Yay! :D We're growing pretty quickly. CA based, we have 10 agencies currently, and we're about to launch LA City and LA County, which will do a number on our servers! And hopefully make the story a little more well-known. I'm glad you think it's a good idea. PM me to tell me the outcome of your meeting! I'd be excited to hear.

I was the original developer on the app so I had the privilege to work REALLY close to the people who came up with the idea. It has since blown up, and there are new people, some people moved on to other things... but the best quote from that time was when it was said, "Trying to profit from this will lessen how effective the app is. Imagine if you found the cure for cancer and could load it into a pill. You could easily charge hundreds of thousands, or millions of dollars for it. But then it wouldn't be as effective. People would still die." I'm paraphrasing of course, but the founding minds do not want to sacrifice effectiveness for profit. I think it tells you lots about the people behind this project :) They are, in my mind, very great people.

Portland, Oregon? Yea, we have people who reach out to cities. We have other countries interested, too :D