Crowdsource your health | Lucien Engelen | TEDxMaastricht

You can use your smartphone to find a local ATM, but what if you need a defibrillator? In this talk, Lucien Engelen shows us online innovations that are changing the way we save lives, including a crowdsourced map of local AEDs.

You can do this with techniques like this,

but also by crowdsourcing.

And one of the things we did,

that I would like to share with you
introduced by a little video.

(Music)

(Heart-beat)

We've all got
navigation controls in our car.

We maybe even have it in our cellphone.

We perfectly know where all the ATMs are,

just about the city of Maastricht.

The other thing is we know
where all the gas stations are.

And sure, we could find fast food chains.

But where would be the nearest AED
to help this patient?

We asked around, and nobody knew.

Nobody knew where
the nearest lifesaving AED

was to be obtained right now.

So what we did,
we crowdsourced the Netherlands.

We set up a website, and asked the crowd,

"If you see an AED, please submit it,

tell us where it is,
tell us when it's open,"

since sometimes in office hours
it's closed, of course.

And over 10,000 AEDs in the Netherlands

already have been submitted.

The next step we took
was to find the applications for it.

And we built an iPad application.

We made an application
for Layar: Augmented Reality,

to find these AEDs.

And whenever you are
in a city like Maastricht,

and somebody collapses,
you can use your iPhone,

and within the next weeks
also your Microsoft cellphone,

to find the nearest AED,

which can save lives.

And as of today,

we would like to introduce this,
not only as AED4EU,

which is what the product is called,

but also AED4US.

And we would like to start this
on a worldwide level.

And ask all of our colleagues
in the rest of the world,

colleague universities, to help us

to find and work and act like a hub

to crowdsource all these AEDs
all around the world,

that whenever you're on holiday
and somebody collapses,

might it be your own relative
or someone just in front of you,

you can find this.

The other thing we would like to ask

is of companies also all over the world

that will be able to help us
validate these AEDs.

These might be courier services

or cable guys, for instance,

just to see whether
the AED that is submitted

is still in place.

So please help us.

(Applause)