Smartwatch based automatic detection of out-of-hospital cardiac arrest: Study rationale and protocol of the

Out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA) is a leading cause of mortality. Immediate detection and treatment are of paramount importance for survival and good quality of life. The first link in the 'chain of survival' after OHCA - the early recognition and alerting of emergency medical services - is at the same time the weakest link as it entirely depends on witnesses. About one half of OHCA cases are unwitnessed, and victims of unwitnessed OHCA have virtually no chance of survival with good neurologic outcome. Also in case of a witnessed cardiac arrest, alerting of emergency medical services is often delayed for several minutes. Therefore, a technological solution to automatically detect cardiac arrests and to instantly trigger an emergency response has the potential to save thousands of lives per year and to greatly improve neurologic recovery and quality of life in survivors. The HEART-SAFE consortium, consisting of two academic centres and three companies in the Netherlands, collaborates to develop and implement a technical solution to reliably detect OHCA based on sensor signals derived from commercially available smartwatches using artificial intelligence. In this manuscript, we describe the rationale, the envisioned solution, as well as a protocol outline of the work packages involved in the development of the technology.

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© 2022 The Author(s).

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Beat Nideröst is CTO of 111b.v., Tom A. Kooy is International Business Developer at Stan b.v., Steve Thijssen is Co-Founder of Wavy Assistant b.v. All three companies are involved in the development of the proposed technology within the HEART-SAFE consortium. Hans van Schuppen reports grants to his institution from the Zoll Foundation and Stryker Emergency Care, both outside the submitted work.