AED Wish List?

Most of the best product suggestions and innovations come from the people actually using the products. If you could talk directly to the engineers of an AED manufacturer what are the top 5 features or issues you wish an AED would include or solved (size, price or new features)?

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Permalink Reply by Neil White on September 23, 2010 at 1:10pm

Great Question!!

I'd like to see the size and price come down sufficiently enough so that they can be housed in most communities. At the moment in the UK even basic solutions cost over £1500's

Self check system that maybe could send a text message if a problem arose. In rural areas these machines sit unattended for months on end in public access boxes.

The ability to review data without the need to buy expensive software...

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Permalink Reply by John Gaines on September 23, 2010 at 10:55pm

I love the idea about data review. I'll go one further. How about a code summary to print upon EMS arrival. That would help give us a better idea of what had been happening and times.

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Permalink Reply by The Cannulator on September 23, 2010 at 11:22pm

How about a device that is still True Public Access AED in size, but can be upspecced by a higher trained individual on arrival eg. manual shocks, pacing, multviews.

It would be nice if someone had the guts to make defibrillation connectors universal across ALL defibrillators.
Fine if most public and fire units in my state are compatible with our Services unit, consistency with ERs and other groups would reduce time for cable and lead patching.

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Permalink Reply by Ben Waller on September 24, 2010 at 5:20am

How about a "perfection" feaature that eliminated all refractory fibrillation? One shock and start the post-resuscitation care...

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Permalink Reply by Elizabeth Carter on September 24, 2010 at 11:38am

Wow... that is a really great question.
* As an instructor I would love to be able to tell the public that ALL AEDs have Universal connectors.
* I think it would be awesome for EMS to have the ability to print a strip right there by the victim's side.
* I think all ERs set up to accept cardiac patients need to have the ablility to download the recorded event right there in the ER vs. having to take the AED to someone else to have it done.

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Permalink Reply by Bill DeMars on September 24, 2010 at 5:03pm

Elizabeth,

Great stuff!! When you say print a strip, what strip would you like (i.e. ECG, CPR etc).

Thanks.

Bill

Elizabeth Carter said:

Wow... that is a really great question.
* As an instructor I would love to be able to tell the public that ALL AEDs have Universal connectors.
* I think it would be awesome for EMS to have the ability to print a strip right there by the victim's side.
* I think all ERs set up to accept cardiac patients need to have the ablility to download the recorded event right there in the ER vs. having to take the AED to someone else to have it done.

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Permalink Reply by Braden Peters on July 23, 2012 at 12:25pm

Take a defib like the phillips FR3 AED, zoll aed pro or the lifepak 1000, which is a nice small defib and add:

-universal connector for the pads

-realtime CPR FEEDBACK and a optional cpr metronome (some already have this).

-Spo2 w/ alarms

-Advisory monitoring (like on the LP12, it will allow you to use unit as a monitor but will detect a shockable rhythm and kick over to AED mode).

-3 or 5 lead ECG monitoring

-Long life rechargeable battery.

-Option for an als mode (the fr3 already has this).

-Ability for the emerg to easily download data off the unit, using a standard usb cable or sd card system.

In essence this would be a AED that powers on as an aed, but can be converted to a monitor (spo2 and ecg) that would still monitor the ECG in advisory mode when the monitor is being used.

The other features (manual mode, monitoring parameters) would be accessed through a simple 3-4 button softkey system that would bve unobtrusive and would not interfere with the operation of the aed. There would be only one softkey active at power up, which would be to put the unit into monitoring mode with AED advisory monitoring. At any time, the user could return to normal aed mode by pressing the same softkey. The other softkeys would be used for the menu functions and to enter manual mode (which would be in a menu or assigned to a softkey depending on how the unit is configured).

In the future I'd like to see:

-A refined version of the zoll see-thru cpr that would allow analysis w/o stopping CPR.

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Permalink Reply by Devin Nemec on July 24, 2012 at 11:15am

I would assume that for "printing a strip" the AED would print all of the "analyzing" rhythms it obtained during its last activation. There's no need to see 20 minutes of somebody pushing on a chest with occasional 15 second pauses. Adding bluetooth to upload to EMS laptops on scene using a universal format would be helpful too. Otherwise, a USB connector would be invaluable. Using specialty memory cards is just convoluted and inefficient.

Oh yeah, and a BVM or at least CPR mask included with every AED. Why haven't they done this yet?