Home delivery CPR kit made of cardboard wins prestigious award

Umeå Institute of Design alumnus Shuai Li is the national winner of the James Dyson Award with his graduate project CANNE, a self-directed CPR kit consisting only of cardboard and a smartphone app.

More than 17 million people die from cardiac arrests each year in the world. In China alone that figure is 540,000, with the out-of-hospital cardiac arrest survival rate sitting below one percent.

Shuai Li wanted to explore an affordable way to offer millions of people training in Cardiopulmonary resuscitation, CPR, in developing countries, China specifically. The result, CANNE, is a home delivery CPR kit that is self-directed, low-cost and sustainable. The CANNE CPR kit improves on today’s on-site CPR training by enhancing cardiac arrest scenario simulation through AR and AI technologies via the smartphone.

The CANNE design concept consists of two parts:

• A corrugated cardboard Basic Life Support (BLS) learning kit that allows laypeople to practice CPR, such as cardiac arrest identification, chest compression and ventilation by themselves.

• The BLS self-directed application on the smartphone that enhances the learning experience by simulating cardiac arrest scenarios and emergency medical services (EMS), providing real-time feedback of compression and ventilation, as well as encouraging lay people to join a final examination and granting an online BLS certificate.

“During my Master’s in Advanced Product Design at UID, my interest in healthcare industrial design led to an internship in Laerdal Medical, Norway, where I explored the CPR training area. This experience inspired me to further examine CPR training in different demanding and realistic situations. In China and other developing countries, where the economy is developing rapidly, I identified a host of challenges and opportunities worth exploring further” says Shuai Li.

It has proven difficult to increase the survival rate of out-of-hospital cardiac arrest in developing countries because of the low implementation rate of CPR training, which can often be too costly in rural areas. With CANNE, Shuai Li hopes to provide an affordable and accessible CPR training ecosystem that motivates more laypeople to learn CPR by themselves. The product has the potential to reach all smartphone users, a number that is fast approaching four billion globally.

“I am currently looking into how I can move forward with this project and would love to reach the market and improve the life-saving skills of the lay public in China and beyond. For me, it's important that the final design follows a sustainable vision. The next steps will be to iterate the physical and digital product, such as simplifying the assembly process and decreasing the colour of prints on cardboard for a sustainable and lower cost purpose. I also hope to work with the collaborating company, Laerdal Medical, to test it in a current process“ says Shuai Li.

With CANNE, Shuai Li became Sweden’s national winners of the James Dyson Award, an international design award promoting the next generation of design engineers. On November 17^th, the international winner and the winner of the sustainability award will be announced.

Explore CANNE in the UID21 Project Gallery

For more information, please contact:

Jens Persson, Communications Officer
Phone: +46 73-626 35 51
Email: jens.persson@umu.se