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San Ramon Valley Fire Chief Richard Price was in Washington, D.C., Friday afternoon to present a free life-saving mobile phone app at a White House "Safety Datapalooza," a fire district spokeswoman said.

Price was invited to the nation's capital to present the PulsePoint app, which alerts CPR-trained residents when a nearby person is
suffering from sudden cardiac arrest nearby.

The local chief is joining other innovators from the non-profit, academic and private sectors who have used available government data to create apps and other products and services that advance public safety, district spokeswoman Kim French said.

The event is organized by the White House offices of Public Engagement, Science and Technology Policy and the U.S. Department of Transportation.

Price, who presides over the Pleasanton-based nonprofit PulsePoint Foundation that created the app, has said the technology "empowers everyday
citizens to provide life-saving assistance to the victims of sudden cardiac arrest."

The app, originally conceived of and piloted by the San Ramon Valley Fire Protection District, is now also used by a number of other public safety agencies across the Bay Area, according to district officials.

Price said the app has been activated about 100 times by the end of August, and usually gets around a dozen responders.

"For example, we had an incident at Peet's in downtown Danville," he told the Express. "In that particular case, we had CPR responders, people out front directing rescue workers in, others to switch out doing CPR, people clapping to 100 times a minute. What we don't know is if the people in Peet's would have responded anyway. We'd like to know -- when 10 people are activated, do we get two or eight?"

In some rural areas where emergency response times are lengthy, PulsePoint has been asked to make the alerts go out to a larger area. Radiuses are also being fine tuned to see how many people will say they didn't go because the call was too far away.

Glenn Wholtmann contributed to this story

— Bay City News Service

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