Mobile Retter

Background

The Mobile Rescuer system was developed to reduce response times in medical emergencies, particularly cardiac arrest. It is a platform that uses GPS tracking to alert first responders who are in the vicinity of an emergency via an app. The qualified responders are medical professionals or have the appropriate training. Due to their proximity, they can be on the scene within minutes and initiate life-saving measures before the ambulance service arrives. At the same time, the app can be used to alert other people who, for example, can bring an accessible AED to the scene of the emergency or secure the accident site.

Challenges

Since 2016, adesso has been working with its subsidiary medgineering GmbH and the registered association Mobile Retter to improve the first responder communication system for emergency control centres. The initial challenges included capacity limits and the need to acquire further regions for the system. Other important aspects that had to be taken into account during development included compliance with a comprehensive data protection and rights concept, and the ability to provide cross-regional alerting. Furthermore, the different conditions in regional control centres pose a challenge, as do the data protection-compliant localisation of mobile devices and the secure provision of relevant patient data. In addition, the implementation of the system requires the overcoming of bureaucratic processes and requirements in order to enable efficient and comprehensive use.

Role of adesso

adesso developed the alerting system and smartphone app from scratch for medgineering. Today, the system is based on a cloud-based microservice architecture that ensures a high level of reliability. As a service provider, medgineering is responsible for integrating and connecting the system to the emergency call centres. To this end, standardised concepts were developed that also take into account the different requirements and circumstances in the regional control centres. A support team ensures the functionality and further development of the platform.

The core technologies include:

• Microsoft Azure offers a scalable and secure cloud infrastructure.
• Microsoft.NET enables the development of stable and powerful applications.
• Integrated interface to Google Maps, or maps for easy navigation from the app

Thanks to reliable integration into existing control centre systems, the app enables precise and efficient coordination of the available first responders. During an operation, they receive all relevant details and further helpful support options via the app. The system first identifies which registered first responders are in the vicinity of the emergency location based on the imprecise location data. At the same time, the system checks whether an automated external defibrillator (AED) is available nearby and, if necessary, alerts additional people as AED messengers. When an emergency call comes in, the distance to the emergency location is checked by means of a precise location query. The people who can get to the scene the quickest are alerted. If a person rejects the alert, does not respond or is unable to get to the scene of the emergency (e.g. due to traffic or technical problems) while on the way, a redundancy function kicks in to continue the search for the fastest available people.

Since the system was converted in September 2018, the project has been part of adesso's managed service, ensuring continuous maintenance and optimisation. This ensures stable and reliable processing of over 80,000 operations to date (as of 2024). Around 45,000 users have now registered for the system, which they can access in several languages.

Further topics

• To ensure that the system is always functional and reliable, important processes are checked automatically.
• AI further improves the efficiency of alerting and response times.

Conclusion

The Mobile Rescuer system is an innovative approach to improving emergency care. By combining technology, community engagement and medical expertise, the time without treatment until first aid is provided is drastically reduced. As AI and other technologies continue to develop, this concept will be further optimised to save lives and improve medical care even more.