To the Editor:
Out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA) is a common public health concern globally. To reduce OHCA mortality, effective education on basic life support (BLS) and increasing the rate of bystander cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR), including the use of an automated external defibrillator (AED), is crucial.1 Recent European Resuscitation Council guidelines emphasize the importance of education on BLS. Moreover, it is important to educate people about CPR and expand educational opportunities to enhance their willingness to perform CPR.2, 3 Therefore, we took advantage of “Cool Japan” strong gaming culture and implemented education on BLS using the smartphone videogame of character intellectual property contents called “THE iDOLM@STER SideM” (Bandai Namco Entertainment Inc., Japan) for its fans. We commissioned a videogame cartoon character, Ryu Kimura, to be our special AED ambassador and created free downloadable leaflets about BLS skill with his commentary (Fig. 1). Furthermore, we conducted BLS workshops involving his participation in both online and face-to-face learning. We performed a survey when downloading the leaflet (leaflet group) and when attending the workshops with both online and face-to-face learning (online and face-to-face groups). This study was approved by the Ethics Committee of the Chiba Kaihin Municipal Hospital (approval number: 2021-07). From September 2021 to August 2022, 6,664, 435, and 146 participants participated in the survey from the leaflet, online, and face-to-face groups, respectively. The majority of the participants were women (87.9% in leaflet, 87.8% in online, and 83.6% in face-to-face groups) and aged from 20 s to 30 s (81.8% in leaflet, 85.5% in online, and 87.0% in face-to-face groups). Some participants had never attended BLS workshop (39.3% in leaflet, 29.2% in online, and 41.1% in face-to-face groups). After the workshops, the vast majority expressed their intention to participate in BLS (96.3% in online and 96.6% in face-to-face groups), and wanted to recommend BLS workshops (99.6% in online, and 100% in face-to-face groups). In the free-response questionnaire, we obtained comments such as “collaborating with the smartphone videogame cartoon character was a good opportunity to learn about BLS,” “I was motivated to learn because I like the videogames and the character,” and “I was able to participate in CPR as a bystander.” We were able to target people who were not educated about BLS and provide them learning opportunities. There is an obvious need to expand the program, due to the high motivation explained by the supported activities of popular characters. There are examples of people performing BLS, proving that the approach using personal interests and preferences is effective.
Fig. 1.
Free downloadable leaflets about BLS skill with videogame cartoon character commentary (in Japanese).
Declaration of competing interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
Acknowledgment
The author would like to thank “THE iDOLM@STER SideM” (Bandai Namco Entertainment Inc., Japan), special AED ambassador Ryu Kimura, and all fans for all their help.
References
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