From Public Access Defibrillator to Personal Access Defibrillator: Proposal of Prompts to Optimize Automated External Defibrillation Use by Laypeople

The assistance of a CA should not be limited to healthcare professionals, as bystanders also play an essential role in initiating life support manoeuvres that could increase the survival rates of OHCA patients (3).This is the rationale for training the community in basic life support (BLS) and AED use skills (4).AEDs are designed for laypeople to use safely without prior training.They typically feature two main buttons: one to turn AbstractAim: This study aimed to assess whether integrating additional prompts to the automated external defibrillator (AED) interface could reduce common errors among untrained laypeople. Materials and Methods:An observational before-after design was employed.The Control group (pre-cohort) consisted of 36 participants from previous research, whereas the after cohort included 36 participants with similar characteristics.All participants were evaluated in a simulated out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA) scenario.After one minute of chest compressions, an AED was used to deliver shock.In the follow-up cohort, a smartphone provided voice prompts encouraging proper chest compressions and advising against removing the pads or turning off the AED. Results:In the Control group, six participants turned off the AED (p=0.010), and four removed the pads (p=0.040), while none in the aftercohort group made these errors.Regarding other mistakes, no participants in the after cohort performed compressions in the stomach (two participants in the Control group), two participants did not find the sticky part of the pads (three in the Control group), and two placed the pads in the wrong place (four in the Control group).Conclusions: Simple voice prompts during the 2-minute interval between AED analyses improved the performance of untrained laypeople in a simulated OHCA scenario.