Do you recall one of Saturday Night Fever’s best songs called “Stayin’ Alive” and performed by the Bee Gees?

Under most circumstances, you would not keep the beat of this song in your head, but heart specialists have come up with one good reason to remember it: It could save someone’s life. Turns out the hit is very close to 100 beats per minute, a perfect number to maintain the best rhythm for performing cardiopulmonary resuscitation, or CPR, when faced with a person suffering a cardiac arrest.

In order to learn the right reflexes and techniques, Dassault Systèmes and Ilumens have created the Staying Alive 3D Lifelike experience, available at www.stayingalive.fr/en. Playing the witness (in your office, the street or even during a soccer game), you have 4 minutes to react, call emergency services, perform CPR and use a defibrillator. Staying Alive 3D online experience was launched to support the World Heart Day organized by the World Health Organization

Children already spend a huge amount of time playing games and the trend is not expected to slow down anytime soon. Therefore, why not create a serious experience that still generates emotion, fun and entertainment, and use it to educate, train and inform the general public?

In fact, could games actually make us better? The gamification of extremely serious experiences can enhance the learning curve: learning by doing in a virtual environment involves the process by which game mechanics are added into work or social processes in order to drive user engagement and hook them into further participation.

While only 3% to 4% of people survive from cardiac arrest in France, they are 30% in Seattle, thanks to basic training taught at school and defibrillators being setup in public places, at work or simply in the street next to homes. Indeed, heart attacks mainly happen at home or in the office and in 80% of cases with no medical staff around, which means everyone (including children) need to be trained.

Then, will children teach Adults? With Staying Alive, they will play, save lives in 3D and hopefully, back from school, will teach parents to do the same. By training all of you, we can improve the surviving rate!

Cheers,

Fred Vacher @ fvr(at)3ds.com