By Brent Donaldson
Northern Magazine
There were no warnings. No pain. No dizziness. No signs that Drew Basse was about to die.
It was May 9, and the last thing Drew remembers is sitting in his silver 2007 Saturn View, driver-side door open, dome light on, alone in the muted shadows of a parking garage.
And then.
“My heart just stopped,” he says. “I was dead.”
Until that moment, Basse had spent years working as a truck driver, hauling apples and paper up to 14 hours a day from Portland to California. Two months prior to his collapse, Basse had gone through a divorce with his wife of 30 years. Ready to shed excess weight and emotional fatigue, Basse had begun exercising.
It had been working. The 57-year-old father of two had lost more than 30 pounds from cardio workouts at fitness centers located along his driving routes, like the 24 Hour Fitness in Clackamas, Oregon. That was where, shortly before his heart attack, Basse broke his personal record on the treadmill — 28 minutes. After his workout, Basse hit the Jacuzzi and sauna, then showered and dressed back into his khakis and polo before heading to the parking garage.
At the same time at the same 24 Hour Fitness, firefighter and paramedic Scott Brawner was also working a treadmill. He was listening to classic rock on his iPhone’s Pandora app when the music suddenly stopped. An alert sounded through his headphones and a map appeared onscreen.
Brawner looked down at his phone to see a push notification banner at the top of the screen: CPR Needed. The map below the banner was marked with two pins—one representing his location, the other representing the victim’s — along with the location of the nearest automated defibrillator device (AED).
“I looked around the room,” Brawner says, “I’m doing a quick survey. I went down to the first floor and asked the front desk, ‘Is there a medical emergency here?’ They said no, they hadn’t heard anything. So I went outside and out of the corner of my eye I caught a security guard in the parking structure. He didn’t look right, he looked odd. . .the look on his face.” Brawner ran toward the guard then into the garage where he found Drew Basse sitting in his car, eyeglasses crooked, not breathing.
Brawner managed to pull Basse onto the concrete floor. He began giving Basse no less than 100 chest compressions per minute — what people like Brawner call “high-performance CPR.”
As he administered the compressions, Brawner realized that he’d seen Basse at the gym that morning. He remembered Basse looking out of place, like a new member who didn’t know how to navigate the facility. “And that’s the first thing I thought,” Brawner says. “I just saw this guy downstairs a few minutes ago, and now I’m doing CPR on him.”
Brawner determined that Basse’s heart was in PEA, or pulseless electrical activity, and was not in the “shockable rhythm” necessary to use the defibrillator. A few minutes passed before two EMTs arrived. When they did, Brawner kept administering CPR while they gathered their gear and waited for fire and rescue to show up with more equipment.
When backup responders showed up minutes later, the team moved Drew Basse to the middle of the parking garage and took over his care. A week later in a hospital room at the nearby Portland Adventist Medical Center, Drew Basse’s son introduced his dad to Brawner. “Dad, this is Scott,” the young man said. “The one who did CPR.”
Basse squeezed Brawner’s hand and gave him a wink.
Saved by technology
The technology that facilitated Brawner’s lifesaving CPR that day is called PulsePoint, a mobile smartphone app originally developed at Northern Kentucky University. Drew Basse’s rescue was the first time PulsePoint made national news.
But outside of the dramatic media coverage of lives saved using the app (just Google “PulsePoint saves”), it is equally remarkable that PulsePoint exists at all. While original development of the app began at NKU, the concept and technology behind it represent an incredible convergence of social consciousness, technical know-how, and stubborn determination.
Consider the following sequence of events that led to the moment Scott Brawner found Drew Basse dying in his car. Take away any single item, and everything falls apart:
2004: NKU drafts a plan to create the College of Informatics. Included in the plan are three academic departments (computer science, business informatics, and communications) plus one non-academic department that will become known as the Center for Applied Informatics (CAI). Within a couple of years, mobile app development begins at CAI through a “virtual co-op” outreach program developed for students.
January 29, 2007: Apple introduces the iPhone. NKU becomes one of the first universities in the country to partner with the company for mobile app development.
2007–2009: Students working at CAI produce a number of mobile apps for iPhone and Android devices. NKU establishes a national reputation as a top-tier mobile tech development university.
2009, San Ramon, California: San Ramon Fire Department chief Richard Price is eating lunch at a deli when a fire engine pulls into the parking lot. Medics tend to a man next door who had fallen unconscious from a sudden cardiac arrest. Price, a 30-year veteran emergency responder, realizes that he could have responded to the situation much sooner than the medics had he known about the incident.
2009: Price conceptualizes a mobile app that would allow CPR-trained citizens to assist nearby victims of sudden cardiac arrests. After repeatedly failing to find developers for the project, he receives a tip from a source at Apple, Inc. to contact Northern Kentucky University.
2009: Price calls Tim Ferguson, executive director of NKU’s Center for Applied Informatics. At the end of the conversation Ferguson agrees to take on the project. “We can do this,” he tells Price over the phone. “It’s a great idea and I know our staff and students can pull it off. Let’s get going.”
2011: After nearly two years of collaboration between Price’s team and staff and students from NKU, the PulsePoint prototype app is released.
2012: Upon realizing the app’s potential to save lives, the San Ramon Fire Department and NKU administration create the nonprofit PulsePoint Foundation. All intellectual property for the app’s technology is placed into the foundation. Price and Ferguson are appointed to the foundation board.
2013–2014: The PulsePoint Foundation contracts a private company to continue with further improvements to the app. The San Francisco-based company, called Workday, hires NKU students who had originally worked on its development. NKU students and staff continue to play a role in Pulsepoint via the board membership and with further deployment of the app in cities across the country.
May 9, 2014: Drew Basse collapses in his car outside of a 24 Hour Fitness in Clackamas, Oregon. The PulsePoint app notifies nearby firefighter Scott Brawner, who saves Basse’s life.
Drew Basse recovering
“I don’t know how old you are, but I am from an era where we didn’t even have 911.” On the phone from his home in Milwaukee, Oregon, Drew Basse speaks haltingly at times. It’s best to reach him between 11:30 a.m. and 1:30 p.m., he says, when he is at his most alert. He says that he’s recovering well but still uses a walker for mobility and experiences problems with balance and numbness in his legs and neck—all likely manifestations of the brief amount of time that passed between his cardiac arrest and the moment Scott Brawner found him.
When the security guard made the initial 911 call about Basse, it set off a chain of events. From the time the dispatcher relayed the caller’s information to the moment the emergency responders arrived at Basse’s location, less than 10 minutes had elapsed.
While that may seem fast, more than 90 percent of victims who do not receive treatment during the first nine minutes of an attack will not survive. With each passing minute after a cardiac arrest, the victim’s chance of survival decreases substantially. Sudden cardiac arrest is—by far—the greatest killer among adults over the age of 40. Nine out of 10 victims die.
PulsePoint was created to allow citizens trained in CPR to assist victims immediately. It means that in cities that have integrated the app into their emergency dispatch systems—nearly 900 from coast to coast so far, including Los Angeles, Cleveland, San Diego, Houston, Portland, and Dallas—anyone who has downloaded PulsePoint can be a first responder. With more than 1,000 people dying per day from sudden cardiac arrest in the United States alone, the app’s potential to save lives is hard to imagine.
Here’s how PulsePoint works: For each new city that adopts the app, a tech team installs an application programmer interface (API) directly into the city’s dispatch system. When a 911 dispatcher submits location information about a cardiac arrest victim into the database, the API grabs that information and sends it to the cloud-based PulsePoint system. The app finds the GPS coordinates of the victim and sends a push notification alert to each PulsePoint user located within a specific radius of the victim. All of this takes place within seconds.
“We were a fire department; we had no budget,” Richard Price says, thinking back to the moment he first told his colleagues about his idea for the app. “We had no app developers on staff. We had no idea if it would work or if the technology would even be available. It was a radical idea, to dispatch citizens to major cardiac emergencies. So we just started looking into how we could get the app developed. We started talking to people, and somewhere during that time we learned of NKU’s program. It came highly recommended; this was a university that was ahead of the curve on this.”
“To me,” Brawner says, “that’s the cool tie-in. It started from somebody’s idea and turned into a university project that ended up having a direct effect on Drew’s life. A lot of people come up to me and say, ‘Wow, that was a great thing you did. I want to download that app; I want to be that person.’ The takeaway is really about how precious life is. This is an app that everyone could have. Taking the opportunity to help someone is so rewarding and touches so many people.”
“I wish this was in all 50 states,” Basse says from his home in the Portland suburbs. “In every fire department, every police department. This is something that really needs to take off. Because the next person’s life that is not saved, could have been saved.”
To learn more about PulsePoint, visit www.pulsepoint.org.
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How to Build an App
App Development 101 from CAI Executive Director
Tim Ferguson and College of Informatics Dean Kevin Kirby
Students at NKU’s Center for Applied Informatics have developed websites, analytics work, and mobile apps for clients from Canada to California to Switzerland. Here, Tim Ferguson and College of Informatics Dean Kevin Kirby talk about the all-hands-on-deck nature of app development at Northern Kentucky University. It all starts with a phone call.
Ferguson: So the first thing that happens is that we get a call. We chat with that company to see if there’s a fit for what they’re looking for and what we can provide. The criteria we use there is not only whether can we do it, but whether our students are going to get a great learning experience out of it.
Kirby: These projects that students do are not course projects; they are projects for external clients driven by the client’s needs. Which is an entirely different universe from a faculty member coming in with an assignment. The students interact with clients to deliver specific things on time. You might have a computer science major working side by side with a business informatics major working next to a visual arts major doing the graphic design. They’re all working as a team, building up their technical sophistication but also learning about the outside world and how organizations work.
Ferguson: If it’s a good fit then we invite the client to sit down and do what I would call a requirements session. We listen to them, to what they want, to what they have in place today and how we would integrate into their infrastructure. We map that out and make sure that it’s a fit for us as well.
Kirby: If you look at a mobile app, so much of it is about design. It’s not just about writing code. You have to understand both written and visual communication—the art of design. You have to have a sense of the business context of the application. It all gets interleaved—the social implications, legal implications, the privacy implications and so on. It’s all entangled up together. So it’s not just, “I’m hiring a person to write some code in a vacuum.”
Ferguson: If everything is in place then we create an agreement and write specifications and possibly wireframes and mockups so they can see what we’re going to build. We then go to prototyping. We show them what the screens are going to look like and get them to sign off on that. When everything’s good there, we then go into design and development. We create the product. We develop it, then test and document and deliver it to the client. We ask the client to test it and certify that we’re delivering what was requested. Once they sign off on it, we’re done with that project and then start the process all over again.
This story first appeared in Northern Magazine. It is used by permission.