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In a growing number of countries, a cardiac arrest call does not only dispatch an ambulance. It also alerts trained volunteers who happen to be nearby, ordinary people carrying a phone, asked to drop what they are doing and reach the patient before the professionals can.

Lebensretter in Austria, EVapp in Belgium, HeartRunner in Sweden and Denmark, GoodSAM in the United Kingdom: all of them work on this principle. When it works, compressions begin minutes earlier, and those minutes are most of what survival depends on.

Engagement in these systems varies widely between countries. That variation has mostly been read as an operational artefact, a matter of population density, dispatch protocol, or app design. My doctoral work, supervised by Prof. David Schwartz at the Social Intelligence Lab, Bar-Ilan University, asks what role culture plays in that variation.

How the work fits together

Four studies, each built on what the previous one could not answer alone.

A map of where responses break down

Complete · accepted in BMC Health Services Research

A systematic scoping review of the empirical community first responder literature, following Arksey and O'Malley and reported per PRISMA-ScR. Twenty-three studies yielded a hundred and seventy-five challenge manifestations, which organise into twenty decision points across five stages of a response. Everything after this works from that map.

A theory of stage-bound cultural effects

Complete · accepted at ICIS 2026

Eleven propositions linking five of Hofstede's cultural dimensions to twelve specific decision points. Each had to clear three bars: evidence from cross-cultural psychology beyond Hofstede's own work, a mechanism specific to that decision rather than to general helpfulness, and a boundary condition that could be stated plainly.

A five-country test

In progress · fieldwork

A scenario-based instrument that walks respondents through the five stages and measures, at each decision point, how likely they would be to continue or withdraw. Sweden, Belgium, Austria, Germany and the Netherlands, chosen for their spread across the dimensions. Fieldwork runs in partnership with Lebensretter in Austria and EVapp in Belgium.

A simulation of the mechanism

Planned

Culturally parameterised synthetic populations running the response process, calibrated against the survey data. A cross-sectional survey can establish that the stage-specific effects exist; only a model can show what they do when they compound across many alerts and across the length of a volunteer's career.

UnityPhilly

Alongside the dissertation I work on UnityPhilly, an NIH R01-funded study led by my supervisor, Prof. David Schwartz, in collaboration with Drexel University and the University of Michigan. It runs a smartphone network that connects bystanders to naloxone-carrying volunteers during an opioid overdose. It is the same class of system as the one my dissertation studies, with one difference that changes everything about the design: here the responders are drawn from the population the programme serves, including people who actively use opioids.

That makes participation itself risky. Disclosure carries real legal consequences, so the research design has to hold a tension that is not usually forced this sharply: the study needs rich data about participants, and participants cannot afford for that data to sit in one place.

I designed and operate the volunteer onboarding system that resolves it, and the design knowledge that came out of it is the subject of a design science paper. The generalisable question is how you build enrolment infrastructure that satisfies a protocol governing a stigmatised population without making the research unworkable, and what that costs in throughput, in complexity, and in what you can later analyse.

Read the Bar-Ilan announcement of the award →

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