A MOBILE LIFE PRESERVER

Telerik’s RadControls for Windows Phone 7 helps Mobile First Aid become a lifesaving reality

“I’m very impressed with the terrible fragility of the human body and the unbelievable resiliency of the human spirit.” – Captain Benjamin Franklin “Hawkeye” Pierce, MD, 4077^th M.A.S.H.

Shocking acts of terrorism. Deadly tornadoes. Violent earthquakes and tsunamis. 2012 and the end of the Mayan calendar. It seems as if everywhere you turn these days, you cannot help but be bombarded by news of catastrophic events and dire “end of the world” predictions. No matter what the case, it is nearly impossible to ignore the very human toll these events can or may have upon our world. 

When confronted by emergency situations, often our first impulse is to spring into action, offering assistance, first aid, a helping hand. But without proper first-response or medical training, that resilient, compassionate human spirit that drives us to aid our fellow human beings can end up doing as much harm as good. However, armed with even minimal emergency lifesaving knowledge anyone can render aid, improving victims’ chances of surviving the “golden hour” – those first 60 precious minutes that are critical for successful emergency treatment.

Stefano Driussi is one of those trained first responders; as a Basic Life Support (BLS) instructor, he is well prepared to react when emergencies arise. Driussi is also a skilled software developer and one of the co-founders of Digitalapes, a successful .NET and J2ME application development house. When the company decided to add Windows Phone 7 to its platform repertoire, he began thinking of how he could best combine his basic life support skills with the team’s development expertise. An idea began to take shape for a Windows Phone 7 application that would help users to perform essential first aid in the case of an emergency.

“I wanted to merge these two experiences and obtain something really useful for the end user,” recalls Driussi. “I searched for other similar applications only to find that most of them contain lists of possible pathologies with some descriptions of what to do, or are just the equivalent of real books ported as a mobile application. What I wanted to create was an application that is really helpful for anyone without any particular skill or in simple words, the average Joe.”

Seeing a niche to be filled, he and his team began outlining plans for their application. Dubbed “Mobile First Aid”, the Windows Phone 7-based app would be designed for use by non-medical personnel and able to function as both a guide in emergency situations, as well as a learning tool. Mobile First Aid would also integrate the latest GPS technologies, allowing users to quickly find and share their current location with emergency personnel, as well as a dictionary of common pathologies, their related symptoms, and recommended triage actions. And in keeping with Driussi’s desire to contribute to the common good, Mobile First Aid would be offered to Windows Phone 7 users free of charge. The question was how to bring such a feature-rich application to life quickly, without bankrupting the small company.

Telerik to the Rescue

Driussi began searching for an efficient and cost-effective means for meeting Digitalapes’ development needs. What he found was Telerik’s RadControls for Windows Phone 7. The comprehensive, purpose-built toolset offers a variety of robust controls unavailable in either the UI Toolbox for Windows Phone or the OS itself. The development team soon realized that it appeared to have everything needed to make Mobile First Aid a reality.

“Our first problem was to achieve a crisp look-and-feel that closely mimicked the phone’s native UI. We were missing the animation between page changes and some way to implement a nice tile turn effect,” recounts Driussi. “We found Telerik’s controls and started to integrate them into our application.”

Originally intending to use just the RadPhoneApplicationPage control to achieve their desired seamless page transitions, Digitalapes developers soon found themselves leveraging other RadControls for Windows Phone 7 components, as well.

“RadWindow became a great help – we needed to display some information, like the instructions for the learning section, without having to change an entire page,” he says. “RadWindow is awesome. All we had to do was to create the contents and then set some properties to open it, obtaining cool opening and closing animations for free.”

Other controls, such as RadTransitionControl, also proved critical to the app. Used to display various pages within the learning section, it served as the foundation for a custom pivot control that provided better navigation.

“We had certain circumstances where elements would need to be disabled while maintaining transitions between one section of content and another,” says Driussi. “The simplicity of this control was the winning key; all we had to do was to simply bind the content and let the control handle all of the related animations.”

RadWrapPanel and RadTileAnimation were also important to Mobile First Aid’s development.

“RadWrapPanel is the containing panel behind our lists of pathologies,” he explains. “We’ve used it to mimic the UI tiles of the OS first home. When we coupled it with RadTileAnimation, we easily achieved our goal of maintaining look-and-feel consistency across the app.”

First Aid Goes Mobile

With Telerik’s RadControls for Windows Phone 7, the Digitalapes team was able to bring their Mobile First Aid design fully to fruition in only four months’ time. The resulting richly featured application is fast, sleek, and intuitive.

The Emergency section provides easy-to-understand, practical recommendations for rendering first aid in emergency settings, common pathologies and symptomology, and GPS-based localization capabilities. The Learning section offers users a short first-aid manual outlining the steps needed to perform BLS as defined by the European Resuscitation Council (ERC). More in-depth than the Emergency section, the Learning portion is meant to be read and studied rather than for use during rescue situations. Bridging the two sections is a protocol page, which offers a graphic representation of the ERC’s BLS algorithm and can be navigated naturally via the device’s touchscreen.

Currently undergoing real-world user testing, the Digitalapes team is pleased with and proud of its work on the Mobile First Aid app. Driussi cites Telerik’s RadControls for Windows Phone 7 as one of the reasons the team was able to fulfill its altruistic desire to provide a free, functional mobile first aid reference and learning tool.

“We decided to offer this application for free in the Windows Marketplace and don’t expect any kind of a monetary return for our investment,” says Driussi. “However, using Telerik’s toolkit spared us time that would have been required to manually implement all the controls and animations and that would’ve still probably ended up with worse results.”

“With Telerik’s RadControls for Windows Phone 7 we obtained a powerful set of tools that leveraged the creation of a consistent way to replicate the UI users expect from a Windows Phone 7 application,” he continues. “It allowed us to dedicate our efforts in building the app’s core and contents. This is the greatest advantage in using a well-designed and robust toolkit such as Telerik’s.”

For more information on the Digitalapes Mobile First Aid app, please visit http://www.digitalapes.net/reborn/mobile-first-aid/. You can download the application for free in the MS Marketplace here: http://social.zune.net/redirect?type=phoneApp&id=328e2074-135a-e011-854c-00237de2db9e. For more information about Telerik’s RadControls for Windows Phone, please visit http://www.telerik.com/products/windows-phone.aspx.