A study of optimal location and allocation to improve accessibility of automated external defibrillator

Abstract

On account of population aging and increasing cardiovascular disorders, acute cardiac arrest cases are escalating each year. In order to increase the survival rate of the patients, rapid cardiopulmonary resuscitation is necessary. For this reason, the government is expanding the supply of Automated External Defibrillators(AED). However, the AEDs cannot be effectively deployed to the incident cases that occur outdoors, for the installed AEDs are mostly located indoors. After analyzing the distribution of incident cases within the study area, about 11% of cardiac arrest incidents occurred in open spaces including sidewalks and residential areas. This study was conducted to increase the survival rate of the patients by allocating 41 additional AEDs in the study area using a GIS based location-allocation method. To conduct a feasibility study, the density of a senior floating population covered by the same number of AEDs placed at random and the density covered by the experiment were compared. In conclusion, having excluded outliers caused by geological and social factors, results showed that AEDs placed through GIS based location-allocation covered 5% more of the senior floating population density.