The Montgomery County Department of Public Safety and PulsePoint Foundation have teamed up to improve cardiac arrest survival rates by creating a registry of automated external defibrillators (AEDs).  An AED device is the only tool that can save someone in cardiac arrest.  Pulse Point is a non-profit foundation that uses location-aware mobile devices to help reduce the millions of annual deaths from sudden cardiac arrest. The Montgomery County Department of Public Safety describes the initiative further by saying:

Sudden cardiac arrest is the number one cause of death in student athletes. For every minute that passes without CPR and defibrillation, the chances of survival decrease by 10 percent.

Montgomery County launched the PulsePoint apps in May to improve the survival rate for cardiac arrest victims in the county. Montgomery County is the first county in southeastern Pennsylvania and the second in the state to launch these apps. One app helps direct individuals trained in CPR to victims in sudden cardiac arrest, while the AED registry helps citizens locate AEDs in public places and add them to the app for easy locating in emergencies.

Simon’s Fund  is a non-profit organization founded by Darren and Phyllis Sudman in 2005 in memory of their three-month old son, Simon who died suddenly while taking a nap from an undetected heart condition. Simon’s Fund raises awareness about conditions that lead to sudden cardiac arrest and death.  It has provided free heart screenings to 15,564 students, and of those, about 1 in 100 students has a potentially fatal heart condition. This statistic lead to the Sudden Cardiac Arrest Prevention Act in Pennsylvania, the first law passed in the country to protect student athletes from sudden cardiac arrest.  This same law has now been passed in other states, and as a result, Phyllis Sudman was named the 2014 National Woman of Worth by L’Oréal Paris, beating out more than 4,300 women who were nominated for this honor. GotAED is an initiative of Simon’s Fund and a crowdfunding site dedicated to getting AED devices into places where kids learn and play and is making it practical and affordable for youth-related facilities to acquire a device.

The goal of the contest is to get as many AEDs in the county registered as possible using the PulsePoint AED smart phone app.  So just by uploading pictures of the AED devices in Montgomery County through the PulsePoint Foundation app,  a student will win a $250 scholarship each month.   When the student locates an AED in a public location, they just open the app, enter a brief description of the AED’s location, snap a picture of it and drop a pin on the map.  The Pulsepoint AED and PulsePoint Respond smartphone apps are connected to the Montgomery County Department of Public Safety 911 call center and will alert CPR-trained people who have the app when an ambulance is dispatched in response to a Sudden Cardiac Arrest (SCA) in a public area within a quarter-mile of their location.

The following high schools are already participating: Cheltenham High School, Plymouth-Whitemarsh High School, Methacton High School, North Penn High School, Pottstown Senior High School, Upper Dublin High School, Wissahickon High School

For further information and to register for the scholarship, visit the Got AED website