Rescue Ready

An app to walk through lay rescuers through administering emergency first aid and mental health crisis intervention until professional rescuers arrive. It also finds first aid and CPR certifications.

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Inspiration

This past summer I lifeguarded at my local pool after my usual summer job at the local boy scout camp was canceled. During my time as a lifeguard, I regularly noticed that many of the lifeguards could not perform basic first aid, we even had a manager who didn't know what CPR was and a safety inspector who couldn't remember what to do for bleeding (and that was while they tried to test one of the lifeguards on their first aid skills!). All of this really made me wonder, if we're lifeguards who have to train regularly on first aid and get tested on our skills during near weekly safety inspections, yet many of the lifeguards around me don't know these basic skills, does anyone actually know how to perform first aid?

Luckily for everyone, there are still people who know first aid, but most people don't, even thinking back to my first ever first aid class, several people failed the test after it was delayed by less than a week after the training, and those were all people who were interested enough to take the class on their own.

Unfortunately, those people who do know first aid might not be there when there's an medical emergency, but if we can guide people through performing emergency first aid on the spot, we can make up for those gaps in knowledge and hopefully save lives. Conveniently, with everyone carrying a smartphone around everywhere, this is an excellent use for an app.

Unsurprisingly, a lot of "first aid guide" apps exist, and I've tried most of them, but they range from subpar at best to outright dangerous. Almost all, if not all, of them have a long list of conditions with no explanation of what that condition is or what it's symptoms are, so without already having training and remembering how to identify every one of those conditions. The problem here is that needing to know that defeats the point of the app most of the time as you would be hard pressed to know those symptoms without also remembering the treatments. Many of these apps also have outdated or incorrect information, with some even having information that is harmful, or even deadly, to the patient or rescuer. The absolute best of these apps is the American Red Cross First Aid app, but even has many flaws, not only does it fall into the same pitfall of just being a list of conditions, but it also has a limited number of conditions listed.

Upon realizing that there was such a lack of a good first aid app, I decided to try to fill the gap.

What it does

This app does three things: 1) it walks the user through performing emergency first aid by asking the user questions and using the responses to determine what the patient's condition is and what needs to be done. 2) it prompts the user on how to administer the Columbia Suicide Severity Rating Scale to assess mental health crises and instructs the user the user on how to respond. 3) It encourages the user to get formal, hands on training.

How we built it

This app was built in react-native with a mechanism to parse the information for each condition into dynamically generated screens (none of them are hardcoded!) and to follow a dynamically generated branching tree of options.

Challenges we ran into

1) This was my first ever react native app and only my second ever project in javascript, normally I use PHP, java, or python, so frankly I went into this with no idea how to do it, but I taught myself fast enough, I think. 2) At one point I broke my android compiler (as in the compiler itself not my code) which made it difficult to test for a few hours, until I fixed it, since I only have an android phone, but I did manage to fix it. 3) I can't do art at all and I didn't have enough time to do photography with all the covid guidelines, so I couldn't put many images in the guide, but I left spaces specifically for them on every screen, and I'm going to try to work with some of my more artsy friends in EMS to make graphics for this app in the future. I would also like to mention that I currently have as much graphics as most of the available first aid apps, but that's no reason to not be better. 4) The online emulator didn't play nicely with the metronome, so I had to remove the metronome so that the demo wouldn't crash... 5) My original team was all people I met in the HooHacks Discord, but they all ditched the team to do their own things (or do nothing at all) just before the hackathon...

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Not only was this my first hackathon, but it was also my first app in react-native, and I think it turned out pretty well.

What we learned

I learned JavaScript and react native. Not I learned more about them, as in I went from not knowing react-native and barely knowing JavaScript to knowing both decently well now. I also learned a lot about mobile development and design, as I've only ever written desktop apps and web apps intended for desktop.

What's next for Rescue Ready

Firstly, I intend to keep maintaining it and keeping it up to date with the latest first aid protocols. I also intend to add a few more prompts to triage the patient before the app reaches the point of just presenting you with the remain options, and to split some of the more generalized conditions into more specific ones so that they can have more information about them (and add any conditions that become common place in first aid). As mentioned before, I will also be working with some friends in EMS to create graphics for the app, and once we've done that, I fully intend on publicly releasing this app for free on the google play store and the apple app store, instead of just GitHub, so that it can reach as many people as possible and fulfil it's goal.

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