“Cardiac arrest”—when the heart stops beating—is a critical public health
issue in Canada and globally. There are approximately 60,000 sudden cardiac arrests per year in Canada.
Despite large-scale efforts to improve survival over the last 30 years, approximately 95% of cardiac arrest
patients will not survive. The single most influential factor predicting cardiac arrest survival is recognition
by a bystander witness who can alert emergency medical services. However, 75% of cardiac arrest
patients are unwitnessed—these patients experience delays between the onset of cardiac arrest and
discovery, and thus only 2% survive. New approaches are needed to rapidly detect cardiac arrest and
facilitate a timely professional response. Preliminary modelling work using Canadian data suggests that if
all previously unwitnessed cardiac arrest cases were detected by technology at the time of onset, overall
survival would more than double, translating to an additional ~2000 survivors per year in Canada. We
believe that a wearable cardiac arrest detection system could achieve this goal and bridge the gap between
recognition and survival. Towards this aim, were are building and testing a system to achieve immediate recognition of cardiac
arrest, with the capacity to activate 9-1-1. This project in a collaboration with researchers and trainees at the Implantable Biosensing Lab and the Human Motion Biomechanics Lab (HuMBL) at the UBC School of Biomedical Engineering.
Researchers
Brian Grunau, Babak Shagdan, Calvin Kuo, Jacob Hutton, Mahsa Khalili, Saud Lingawi, Zahra Askari, Sadra Khosravi