by Johannah Cornblatt
Fans of Nintendo Wii use the videogame’s wireless remote to polish their virtual tennis serves or golf swings. Unfortunately, those feats of athleticism don’t translate well in the real world—even a championship Wii boxer shouldn’t consider taking her game to the local Golden Gloves. But soon anyone with the controller will be able to hone a real-life—and lifesaving—skill: CPR.
The American Heart Association has pledged $50,000 to fund the work of four undergraduate biomedical engineering students who designed a computer program that teaches CPR using only the handheld Wii remote and a computer screen. (The team is currently working on identifying a proper stand-in for a practice dummy—most likely a basketball or pillow.)
Students James McKee, Jack Wimbish, Haisam Islam, and Zach Clark began working on the program in January as part of their senior design project for the Biomedical Engineering Department at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.
The university plans to make the program available to the public next spring or summer, and researchers hope the program will help improve the quality of CPR self-instruction.
“We’ve discovered as we’ve done research in CPR that when you just tell people to push two inches at 100 times a minute, they aren’t very good at being able to do that,” says Greg Wallcott, a project adviser. “The hope is that if you can give people feedback and tell them how they’re doing in a real-time fashion, then they are able to complete the task much more effectively.”
The development of Wii CPR is part of the American Heart Association’s larger attempt to use technology as an education tool. The association launched an application for the iPhone this week and a YouTube video earlier this year.
Clark says that the program will allow people not only to learn CPR, but also to help those who know CPR to keep their skills fresh.
“Even if you’re certified, there has been research that shows if you don’t practice your skills, you tend to lose your effectiveness even over a span of a couple months,” he says. “You need recurrent practice to keep up your skill.”
Dr. Vinay Nadkarni, a spokesman for the American Health Association, says the organization hopes that the initiative will bring CPR training to a wider—and younger—audience.
“When parents and grandparents collapse at home, they are frequently found and attended to by a young person,” he says. "And so, if we don’t reach those young people, then unfortunately a lot of lives may be lost.”
About 70 percent of cases of adult cardiac arrest occur in and around the home, according to Nadkarni, who also works in the Department of Anesthesia and Critical Care at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. “A lot of professionals were taking courses, but they weren’t necessarily reaching people in the homes in an easy and simple way." By launching these initiatives, Nadkarni says, “we can quadruple the number of lives saved.”
