In-building automated external defibrillator location planning and assessment through building information models

The morality rate of patients with out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA) is 92%. Public Access Defibrillation before the arrival of emergency medical services is critical in increasing the survival rate of patients with OHCA. The American Heart Association recommends to install automated external defibrillators (AEDs) in areas that are crowded regularly or during specific times and events, including airports, stations, stadiums, schools, offices, and shopping malls. While the importance of deploying AEDs in public areas is widely accepted, the impact of the specific locations and quantities of these AEDs, in terms of efficiency, remains largely un-evaluated. We propose to evaluate the in-building travels through a network, particularly to avoid penetrating the structural obstacles (walls, corners, floors and ceilings), with the aid of Building Information Modeling (BIM) models. The constructed network enables four main decision models in this work: 1) efficient routing to access an AED, 2) optimal location planning of AEDs, 3) a coverage targeting model that finds suitable numbers of AEDs and their corresponding locations, and 4) an AED placement evaluation model. A case study is presented for an actual building, and the coverage rate is increased from 28.33% to 50% given the same amount of AED through the proposed approach.