When you are having a heart attack, time is of the essence. You need to get to the hospital immediately in order to save your life. One of the biggest problems is that your chances of survival fall dramatically if you take more than an hour to arrive at the hospital. You might be delayed because you don’t realize you’re having a serious heart attack, or you might be delayed while getting someone to help take you to the hospital. Whatever the cause, most patients take 2-4 hours to reach the hospital, and that’s why over 400,000 people in the US alone die every year from heart attacks.
I’m in Chicago this week with my colleague Néstor Bermúdez in order to participate in the TADHack here being held around real time and emergency communications. We presented today on this application that Néstor built for the Apple Watch, and we are thrilled to report we won a sponsor prize from Telestax. Telestax provides Restcomm, which we used to make a telephone call to from the iOS app and provide text-to-speech in order to tell the call recipient who is having a heart attack and where to find them.
The following video shows a demo of the application, and was a back up just in case our live demo didn’t work during the hackathon presentations. Fortunately our live demo worked well!
The architecture of the application uses several toolsets from the sponsors of the hackathon. This overview shows how our iOS app will send voice, SMS, and even Slack messages to your loved ones in order to let them know automatically that you are having a heart attack, and how to find you. The app sends these messages automatically when it detects dangerous patterns in your heartbeat, so even if you immediately go unconscious it will notify your loved ones.
The hackathon was a lot of fun and we enjoyed meeting peers in the real time communications field, networking with the excellent sponsors, and it was a great honor to win an award as well. As part of our award, we’ll have a chance at the Real Time Communications Conference to present our application again to a wider audience.
Néstor Bermúdez (left) and Arin Sime (right) from WebRTC.ventures pose with John Senay (center) from Telestax after winning a sponsor award from Telestax at the TADHack Chicago in October 2015
Our team at WebRTC.ventures can build your custom designed telemedicine application – just contact us!
We have deep expertise in many communication technologies, such as WebRTC for video communications, web and mobile application design and development, as well as other real-time communication applications such as this Apple Watch application. We would love to help you save lives and expand medical care!