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AED Defibrillators for back-packers: one-use

lovingkindness

Veteran Member
Time of past OR future Camino
.
Hi there!

A few months ago, whilst doing first aid training our instructor mentioned that there were personal, one-use AED defibrillators on the market suitable for carrying in a back-pack.

I see that there are a number of personal defibs for sale on the internet. Does anyone have experience with these?

Here is an example https://defibsplus.co.nz/cellaed/#

Cheers
Lovingkindness
 
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The one from Galicia (the round) and the one from Castilla & Leon. Individually numbered and made by the same people that make the ones you see on your walk.
I'm sure it will do multiple shocks, otherwise it would be worthless. I assume "one use" means that you can't use it on multiple arrests.

I have emailed them to ask that question - will post when I know. Defibs normally have a feedback to let you know if you need to shock again, there is no mention of this in their description.

Interesting, a defib, most people don't know that it "kills" the casualty by stopping the heart, forcing the body to restart it.
 
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I'm sure it will do multiple shocks, otherwise it would be worthless. I assume "one use" means that you can't use it on multiple arrests.
Correct. A quick look at the website of the unit linked (Cellaed) shows that the model concerned can administer up to 20 shocks.
It's called 'one use' because you literally break the pack in half to deploy/use it.

Quite a neat little item and relatively inexpensive for what it is too.

Not as small and light as James Bonds version but life isn't a movie... :)
 
...and ship it to Santiago for storage. You pick it up once in Santiago. Service offered by Casa Ivar (we use DHL for transportation).
Twenty years ago, I took a wilderness medicine course to prepare for an extended period of long-distance offshore sailing. I asked the instructor about the utility of carrying a defib device on the boat. He did not recommend it because he said defib is the first step in field emergency care and it needed to be followed immediately (within an hour or so) by transport to a hospital setting where advanced care can be rendered. He indicated that without immediate follow-up by trained medical professionals, defib alone probably would not improve the survival of a victim of cardiac arrest. As follow-up care would not be available on an offshore sailing boat, I decided not to buy a defib unit.

The Camino is not as remote as offshore sailing and there are many situations where access to immediate advanced care might be possible (e.g., towns and villages within short distances of hospitals); but alas, much of the Camino is remote enough that it would probably take more than the “golden hour” for emergency services to arrive on scene and transport a victim to hospital.

No doubt care protocols and survival rates have improved in the last 20 years, but the abstract of a somewhat dated 2005 medical paper published in the Mayo Clinic Proceedings seems to back up the advice I received that immediate follow-up in a hospital setting is a critical factor.

“…Survival after VF out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA) depends on a sequence of events called the chain of survival, which includes rapid access to emergency medical services, cardiopulmonary resuscitation, defibrillation, and advanced care.”

A query to ChatGPT4o (which is not necessarily a completely reliable source) yielded a 2015 study published by JAMA that suggests that survival outcomes provided by basic life support (defined below) can be as effective as advanced life support out-of-hospital care.

Here’s a quote from the article that seems to indicate that defib units need to be supplemented by additional life support interventions, e.g. CPR:

“Advanced life support (ALS) providers, or paramedics, are trained to use sophisticated, invasive interventions to treat cardiac arrest, including endotracheal intubation, intravenous fluid and drug delivery, and semiautomatic defibrillation. In contrast, basic life support (BLS) providers, or emergency medical technicians, use simple devices such as bag valve masks and automated external defibrillators…

“However, ALS has no established benefit over BLS for patients with cardiac arrest. Of the few high-quality comparisons that exist, the most robust is a before-after study from Ontario, Canada, which found that ALS did not improve survival to hospital discharge compared with a BLS system that optimized the time to defibrillation. Research from the United States is scant, but observational studies from urban areas of other high-income countries have also failed to find a benefit of prehospital ALS. Similarly, studies on the effectiveness of airway management favor BLS, and evidence of the benefits of intravenous drug delivery in the prehospital setting is limited.”

I claim no medical expertise, but it seems to me that in the Camino setting, defib devices alone may not reduce the number of memorials we see along the trail (many presumably resulting from cardiac issues). Carrying a portable defib unit may help, but only if accompanied by training in CPR and basic life support and, equally critical, immediate access to medical support / transport.

Access to immediate medical support implies knowing where you are geographically at all times (available from the GPS in your adequately-charged smart phone) and how to access emergency services (in Spain dial 112).

Links to papers referenced above:


 
You would also need to know how to correctly perform CPR.

Hopefully no one is needing this item:)
Unfortunately it is sometimes so. A Dutch volunteer at Roncevalles told me only two weeks earlier a pilgrim suffered a heart attack and died only 400m short of the hostal. Very sad but it can happen anytime.
 
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A friend of mine driving in Germany dialled the emergency number asking for assistance from the Police late at night, after unfortunately hitting a large animal, using a smart phone, and they knew exactly where he was immediately without any input from him. Retrospectively he couldn't remember if he had gps "on" on his phone. Can they access that without him switching it on I wonder?
 
Can they access that without him switching it on I wonder?
"They" can't access the location data on your smartphone but your smartphone can send it to them when you make an emergency call even when you have disabled your phone's location services [GPS].

Check what your smartphone's setup and capabilities are. My phone informs me under "Emergency SOS and Privacy":

When using Emergency SOS to call emergency services, the call may include your location, regardless of whether you enable Locations Services [= "enable GPS"], to allow the call handler to assist you.​
It's called AML. There is no guarantee that the feature is available everywhere. It depends on the legal situation in a region/country (data protection laws) and on the technical setup and infrastructure that is available to the local, regional or national emergency services system. Although technically possible when dialling 112, it was not allowed in Germany for several years because of data protection concerns but this has changed now.

In Spain, the emergency services are organised on a regional basis. Some of them introduced AML a couple of years ago; I don't know whether all of them have it in place now.

An NGO called European Emergency Number Association (www.eena.org) may have relevant information.
 
Last edited:
An NGO called European Emergency Number Association (www.eena.org) may have relevant information.
There is, actually. From their "112 DAY REPORT 2023":

Only ten years ago, mobile calls were mostly located using Cell-ID, often with an accuracy ranging from hundreds of metres to several kilometres, making it of little use to PSAPs. In 2016, the United Kingdom and Estonia became the first countries to deploy Advanced Mobile Location (AML) which relies on handset-derived location, with an accuracy range under 50 metres in most instances. 23 countries in the EU benefit today from this technology.
Despite this major step forward, improvements remain to be made: In most countries, SMS-based AML does not function when roaming. There are several options that could help resolve this issue [...]
This report contains a chapter about AED strategy (for countries in Europe of course and not for individuals).
 
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