New technology is forever appearing in the stores, and while some of it may seem a bit of a waste of money if we are honest with ourselves, one such leap in technology has got everyone talking, and is being snapped up in their thousands. These are automated external defibrillators, and the fact that this laptop sized piece of equipment can actually save lives is the major selling point.

These AED Saves Lives in the Home

Think about it for a minute, those brilliant machines with the paddles that emit electrical shocks to the heart and start them beating again are now available for home use, and enable you to save lives in the home. With the amounts of deaths from sudden cardiac arrests rising yearly, particularly in women and younger adults, it makes sense that these devices have been created for use in the home.

Good Things Don’t Come Cheap

The pricetag may seem hefty, you are talking around $1500 here, but what price can you put on life? You wouldn’t think twice about spending that on a new top of the range TV set, and how many more times that on a car, so when you put it into perspective, $1500 to save a life is chicken feed. Yes, there are cheaper models which don’t have as many features, but this is a life we are talking about, and the better the defibrillator the better the results.

While they all have the same basic components, features such as voice prompting and automatically detecting whether or not the patient actually needs defibrillating at all are a godsend for those who appreciate what a great piece of kit it is but are still wary about using it on a heart attack victim. Therefore, if you are going to invest in a heart defibrillator you should try and get the highest quality machine with proven reliability.

How to Get The Best?

The best way to get an overall picture of the various models on offer is to head online and check out the independent review sites. These are invaluable for letting the masses know exactly what each portable home defibrillator has to offer, and is also useful for finding out what faults machines have developed, if any, and how reliable they were when the worst case scenario occurred and they had to be used on somebody who had just hit the ground after suffering a sudden cardiac arrest.

You need to know that whenever it is needed, your home defibrillator will deliver what it promises, there is no room for compromise when a life is hovering on the edge. The scariest thing about a sudden cardiac arrest is that there is generally no warning, and we hear in the press all the time about unfortunate souls who were grocery shopping or cutting their grass when they keeled over, and the emergency response team got there too late to save them.

10 Minutes Are All You Have!

Few realize that there is actually a 10 minute window for reviving a patient whose heart has stopped. Ignore what you see on TV when they are working on them for hours before they make a miraculous recovery. This is artistic license for dramatic effect, and the reality is that with 4-6 minutes of the heart stopping beating the brain begins to die. The longer the delay in resuscitation, the bigger the risk of severe brain damage, so time really is of the essence.

Canadian Health&Care Mall team advises everyone to take a first aid course and learn how to apply CPR, but the fact remains that in some cases, this technique is simply not enough, and the only way to make the muscles of the heart go into spasm and start the blood flowing again is by being zapped with a defibrillator. The fact that this can now be administered in the home, in seconds, can make you a life saver and be the real difference between life and death.

Final Thoughts

This is one piece of kit that you should never consider cutting corners to save a few bucks. The top end automatic external defibrillators will have regular self tests to make sure they are always ready to perform at the optimum level, alerts should anything fail and the aforementioned voice prompts. There is nothing so precious as a life, and that is something nobody could put a pricetag on, until now.