Beginning Tuesday, participants in Philadelphia will use a free app downloaded to their phones to transmit photos and locations of the city's estimated 5,000 AEDs. These backpack-size machines can assess a cardiac-arrest victim and, if appropriate, deliver an electric shock to restart the heart. Studies show even sixth graders can follow an AED's step-by-step audio directions.
But in this age of cyber collaboration, the contest, called "MyHeartMap Challenge," is reaching far beyond the City of Brotherly Love. One gung-ho team of searchers is made up of computer gurus located at four universities in the United States, England, and the United Arab Emirates (thus the Abu Dhabi connection).
"From a scientific standpoint, crowdsourcing is a hot area," said team leader Manuel Cebrian, a University of California-San Diego researcher who read about the Penn contest in an online magazine. "We very rarely have a chance to piggyback on an experiment like this."
Indeed, the six-week-long experiment may push the scientific envelope, adding a public health coup to the many examples of successful crowdsourcing projects (for a list, see Wikipedia, the crowdsourced encyclopedia).
"We have hundreds of computer models simulating the challenge," Cebrian said. "That's useful for designing strategies, but nothing can fully anticipate reality."
Penn emergency physician Raina Merchant, who is leading the heart-map project, said the public is a powerful but unknown quantity. Among the crowds Penn has enlisted to help find AEDs: Philadelphia schools, emergency responders, bike messengers, social media "meet-up" groups - and The Inquirer, which created a special web page with clues and puzzles.
