A survey on technologies used during Out of Hospital Cardiac Arrest

Abstract

Background: Out of hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA) causes close to 400,000 deaths every year in North America, and it is also a leading cause of death among young athletes.OHCA is a treatable medical condition, and the patient's survival chances can be increased if immediate treatment is provided to the patient. However, non-treatment of the patient leads to a dramatic decline in survival chances at 10% per minute. Currently, various technologies are being used, and many more are being researched to reduce the time to provide early treatment to the patient.Objective: This survey focuses on summarizing various available technologies for use during OHCA. This survey focuses on evaluating technologies used in each step of the OHCA process.Methods: In this survey, articles were searched using the term "ohca" on Google Scholar and more than 18,000 articles were found. The articles were further filtered using keywords for each stage of the OHCA process (2,128). For each step, articles were filtered again using author developed method to select articles relevant to each technology for each step of the OHCA process (339). Finally, articles were manually filtered by authors based on their relevance and 112 articles were used in this survey.Results: The technologies that exist today work independently and are not linked with the other steps of the OHCA process. Integration between these technologies could help in reducing time and increase the survival chances of the patient. Also, if it is found that some of the proposed solutions are experimental in nature and not meant to be used in the real-world OHCA scenarios.