Development of a test protocol to evaluate infant CPR training manikins

The lack of well-documented open-source test protocols for the evaluation of cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) training manikins is an important issue for the assessment of CPR training manikins. Test protocols provide reliable information for validating manikin models. Thus, the objective of this work is to create a cross-platform, open-source LabVIEW program for the assessment of the manikin thoracic force-displacement response and force and chest-depth feedback mechanism, and to propose a test protocol that uses an Universal Testing Machine (UTM). Results of the implementation of the test protocol on an infant CPR training manikin with hysteretic thoracic response and real-time feedback mechanism are also presented. Thoracic force-displacement response is evaluated by calculating the root-mean square error (RMSE) between experimentally obtained and theoretically desired curves. Using the proposed test protocol, the infant CPR training manikin was quantitatively evaluated. Indeed, for the evaluated manikin, the compression, decompression and final score are found to be ±17 N, ±83 N and ±50 N respectively, implying that the compression phase was close to the desired curve while the decompression phase was not.