Lifesaving App
The American Heart Association has introduced a smartphone application named “Pocket First Aid & CPR” which is updated with all the current information and reference materials that one may need during an emergency.
This app has five sections: First Aid Basics, CPR and AED, Medical Emergencies, Injury Emergencies, and Environmental Emergencies. Pocket First Aid & CPR includes videos and illustrations to help guide you through a medical emergency. For $1.99 on your Android or iPhone device, you could have access to an array of information that could help you save a life.
Using Pocket First Aid & CPR
One may not think that this smartphone app is necessary, but it helped save the life of a man named Dan Woolley back in 2010. Woolley used the app on his cell phone to help him survive and earthquake that took place at the Hotel Montana in Port-au-Prince Haiti.
Woolley, an aid worker, husband, and father from Colorado Springs, CO was in Haiti making a film about poverty in Haiti when he and his colleague David Hames had just returned to their hotel. “Then all of a sudden just all craziness broke loose,” Woolley said. “Convulsions of the ground around us, the walls started rippling and then falling on us. [Hames] yelled out, ‘I think it’s an earthquake!’ I looked for someplace safe to jump to and there was no safe place.”
Woolley was concerned that he may have been experiencing shock and luckily had the Pocket First Aid & CPR app pre-downloaded to his phone. Woolley immediately began to look up what to do and it warned him not to fall asleep if he was in shock. Woolley set up alarms in 20 minute intervals to help him stay awake. Woolley also used to app to learn how to tend to his wounds and stop bleeding. After more than 60 hours of being trapped, Woolley was rescued. “Woolley said his phone ‘was like a high-tech version of a Swiss Army knife that enabled me to treat my own injuries, track time, stay awake and stay alive.’”
The Pocket First Aid & CPR application can save lives. Dan Woolley is only one story of someone who used the app to save his own life – imagine how many lives could be saved if everyone downloaded this app.
