+
upworthy
More

This innovative app allows volunteer responders to help strangers in need.

Have dreams of being a real-life superhero? There's an app for that.

Jeff Olson was elbow-deep in a car engine when he heard his cellphone ping. He dropped everything and ran out the door.

The ping was an alert from an app he had on his phone called PulsePoint, which points Good Samaritans in the direction of a distress call. The app was developed by Richard Price, a retired fire chief who understands the importance of quick responses to a crisis.


Image courtesy of PulsePoint.

"It sounded like an Amber Alert, you know how they come out, and so I looked at it and it said CPR needed and it gave the address," Olson told KXLY, the ABC affiliate in Spokane, Washington.

The alert Olson received said a young boy had stopped breathing just a few blocks away.

Since Olson was trained in CPR, he knew he might be able to help. He sprinted over to the address PulsePoint gave him, where he found the boy — just an infant — unconscious.

His mother was panicking because the baby had started turning blue.

Image via KXLY/YouTube.

Olson had been a volunteer EMT for Deer Park Ambulance, but he'd never performed CPR on an infant before.

In that moment, however, he knew his skills were better than nothing, so he scooped the little boy up and attempted rescue breathing. His efforts ended up saving the baby's life.

Image via KXLY/YouTube.

Olson's heroic act was the first to be directly attributed to the PulsePoint app and is a prime example of how helpful apps like it could be to communities nationwide.

Since its inception, several other Good Samaritan apps have hit the market.

One, which appropriately enough is called the GoodSAM app, uses GPS technology to locate rescue and medical professionals in the area of an emergency. Another called First Aid by the American Red Cross gives easy-to-follow instructions on how to handle most common first aid emergencies.

PulsePoint is distinctive in that it gets nearby civilians on the scene before first responders so that they can take action more quickly if needed.

For now, PulsePoint only works in communities where it's been implemented by the local fire department and/or EMS agency.

The Seattle Fire Department just announced that it has adopted the app and is encouraging residents to download it.

It's helpful to have basic CPR training if you plan to use it, but if you don't, the app does have a handy interactive diagram, complete with compression rate metronome.

GIF via PulsePoint Foundation.

"CPR today is very easy to perform and can be learned quickly in informal settings such as community street fairs, group training sessions, take-home DVD-based courses and even by watching brief online videos," says Jan Sprake from the Medic One Foundation, who has been working with the app since its inception, though Sprake is careful to note that these training environments are not the same as being CPR certified.

It's unclear how the fire department and PulsePoint will handle liability issues for the app's users; generally it's best to let trained professionals handle medical emergencies. In situations where time is of the essence, however, an immediate though untrained response may still be superior to no response, at least until the first responders can arrive and take over.

The PulsePoint app was originally designed to assist victims of sudden cardiac arrest, which kills nearly 1,000 people each day.

Without immediate assistance, people who suffer sudden cardiac arrest — basically, severe heart attacks in which the heart stops immediately — have a slim chance of survival.

If CPR is administered within minutes of arrest, a person's odds of survival increase dramatically.

Image via PulsePoint.

How dramatically? According to a recent study in the New England Journal of Medicine, patients who received CPR from a bystander before medical help arrived were more than twice as likely to survive the incident than those who didn't.

Now, imagine there are 30 capable, volunteer responders within 10 blocks of the person suffering sudden cardiac arrest, all of whom have been alerted to the situation by PulsePoint or a similar app. That person's chances of survival just went through the roof, didn't it?

If every community implemented volunteer responder apps like this, SCA might no longer be a death sentence.

To get your local community on board, write your local fire chief, EMS office, and/or your local elected officials and tell them how crucial such apps could be in saving a life. There are plenty of potential real-life heroes like Jeff Olson in this country, they just need an app to tell them where to go.

Check out PulsePoint's instructional video here:


Family

Mom calls out teacher who gave her son a 'zero' grade for not providing class with supplies

Her viral video sparked a debate as to whether or not providing school supplies should be mandatory for parents.

@shanittanicole/TikTok

A zero grade for not providing school supplies?

The debate as to whether or not parents should supply classroom supplies is not new. But as prices continue to rise, parents are growing more baffled as to how they can be expected by teachers to provide all the various glue sticks, colored pencils, rulers and other various items the incoming students might need.

What’s even more perplexing, however, is penalizing the children of parents who won’t (or can’t) provide them.

This was the case for Shanitta Nicole, who discovered her son received a zero grade in his new school for not bringing school supplies for the entire classroom.
Keep ReadingShow less
via Pexels

Millennials are now old enough to seriously reflect on life.

It seems like only yesterday a millennial was a college kid that baby boomers chided for being entitled and Gen Xers thought were way too sincere and needed to learn how to take a joke. Today, the oldest millennials, those born around 1980, have hit their 40s and have lived long enough to have some serious regrets.

They also have enough experience to take some pride in decisions that, in hindsight, were the right moves.

The good news is that at 40 there is still plenty of time to learn from our successes and failures to set ourselves up for a great second half of life. These lessons are also valuable to the Gen Zers coming up who can avoid the pitfalls of the older generation.

A Reddit user who has since deleted their profile asked millennials nearing 40 “what were your biggest mistakes at this point in life?” and they received more than 2,200 responses. The biggest regrets these millennials have are being flippant about their health and not saving enough money when they were younger.

Keep ReadingShow less


Time travel back to 1905.

Back in 1905, a book called "The Apples of New York" was published by the New York State Department of Agriculture. It featured hundreds of apple varieties of all shapes, colors, and sizes, including Thomas Jefferson's personal favorite, the Esopus Spitzenburg.






Keep ReadingShow less
via Wikimedia Commons and Jerry Woody/Wikimedia Commons

Two Victoria gentleman and a shilling from 1894.

If you had a time machine and woke up in Victorian-era London (1837-1901), you would have difficulty breathing because of the air quality. You'd also walk around plugging your nose because of the poor sanitation and probably be very confused when purchasing anything because of the monetary system.

J. Draper, a London historian and tour guide, explained why money was so different in the Victorian era in a popular YouTube video with nearly 300,000 views. “Let me try and explain how pounds, shillings and pence worked,” J Draper opens her video.

Keep ReadingShow less

Man hears stepdaughter call him "Dad" for the first time.

Being a parent is often a thankless job, and being a stepparent is usually even more thankless. But most parents show up and do their best to make sure their kids have what they need and feel loved. So when our kids do or say something to show appreciation, it melts our hearts—but nothing melts it faster than a stepchild calling their bonus parent "Mom" or "Dad" for the first time.

A creator named Shane posted a clip from a longer video showing his reaction to hearing his stepdaughter call him "Dad" for the first time. The full video is about three years old, but when it was reposted as a clip recently, it pulled on everyone's heartstrings.

Shane and his wife, Liana, run the social media pages Shane and Liana where they post silly videos pranking each other. But this video wasn't a prank. His stepdaughter, London, wanted to surprise him after wanting to call him "Dad" for a long time.

Keep ReadingShow less

Dog refuses to walk with Mom, but her legs work with Grandma.

What gives dogs the right to have such big and hilarious personalities? It seems like these dogs have found a way to make their humans laugh while also annoying them until they're ready to come apart. It's truly a skill that only dogs and toddlers seem to possess in great quantities.

Zoe is a pit bull with a bombastic side-eye that makes it clear that she only tolerates her mother, Raven, but adores her grandmother, Yonika. There is no confusion about who her favorite person is, and Zoe's grandmother only seems to encourage the behavior. The two of them are the best of friends, and Mom...well, she's the third wheel.

Sure, Zoe likes her mom a little—she does feed her, after all—but the verdict is still being determined if love can be claimed. Raven can't even convince the sassy pittie to go on a walk with her.

Keep ReadingShow less