The trouble is, AEDs (automated external defibrillators) are rarely used. There are lots of reasons, but one is that the devices aren’t always located where they can be reached quickly in an emergency.
That’s the problem tackled by University of Toronto’s Timothy C.Y. Chan, UC Berkeley’s Zuo-Jun (Max) Shen and UCLA Anderson’s Auyon Siddiq in a paper published in Operations Research. The authors propose a model for deploying publicly accessible AEDs where they’re most likely to be used by taking into account where cardiac arrests might occur, not just where they happened in the past. With the model, the authors say, health officials can position the devices in a way that “can improve survival rates by shortening the distance to the nearest AED.”
Full article at: UCLA Anderson Review