Students at an Alabama university are working on a project to teach cardiopulmonary resuscitation techniques using the controller from a Nintendo Wii. The project has already attracted $50,000 in funding from the American Heart Association.

Four biomedical engineering undergraduates from the University of Alabama at Birmingham have been working on the project for the past seven months. It’s the idea of faculty advisor Greg Walcott, the university’s associate professor of medicine. He explained:

We began talking about the possibility of using the Nintendo Wii to teach CPR last January, and that is when we initially contacted the American Heart Association about the idea. The Heart Association wanted a better sense of how it might work, so we assigned the research to our senior year biomedical engineering students this past spring semester for their senior project.

As part of their course in biomedical engineering the students, James McKee, Jack Wimbish, Haisam Islam and Zach Clark, produced a working prototype. That was enough to attract the interest of the AHA which is funding a full-scale development.

There’s no official Nintendo tie-up yet. Once completed, the program will be published on the AHA Web site on an open source basis, with no charge for downloading. It will be a PC-based application which takes advantage of the fact that the Wii remote can be used on computers via a Bluetooth connection.

The AHA is on something of a consumer technology roll at the moment. It’s recently launched a $3.99 app for the iPhone which includes details and advice on a wide range of first aid situations, plus video demonstrations on how to give CPR. The app also allows the user to store details about themselves which could be useful if they fall ill, such as emergency contacts, doctor details, health insurance information and any allergies they have, including to medication.

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Entry was posted on Monday, July 13th, 2009 at 10:37 am under Health, Technology.

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