Hear AED: Turning LINE into a Lifesaving Tool for Emergency Response

Ditching the app, maximizing what a LINE Official Account can do

Emson is a nonprofit dedicated to promoting first-aid culture, backed by emergency physicians and volunteers who’ve personally responded to countless OHCA (out-of-hospital cardiac arrest) cases — they know firsthand how hard first aid really is.

Hear AED originally had its own standalone app. But first aid is a race against time — how do you get more responders willing to sign up, quickly pick up a case, and go help?

Their requirements sounded simple at first, but once we actually dug in, we found that building a platform that truly fit the use case was far harder than it looked.

In the end, the decision was made: Hear AED would drop the app entirely — everything would run on LINE.

For Taiwan’s out-of-hospital cardiac arrest cases, the bystander is usually just a stranger passing by — not a trained first-aid volunteer, not medical personnel, just an ordinary person who happens to be there. Expecting these people to have an app already installed and know how to use it before an emergency happens is nearly impossible.

Hear AED’s primary channel runs on a LINE Official Account, with the standalone app reserved only for advanced users with specific needs (for example, site managers who need Bluetooth scanning of AED devices).

Taiwan’s LINE penetration rate exceeds 88% — adding an official account requires no download and no learning curve. This decision later proved to be the single most important factor in the project’s reach.

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Making clever use of the Rich Menu

Image source: Hear AED LINE Official Account

The Rich Menu takes up only about a third of the phone screen, yet it packs in a lot of functionality. Open the current Hear AED LINE account, register as a member, and you’ll see a rich set of features. Through several rounds of interviews with the client, we distilled the user flow down to a few core directions:

1. Keep high-frequency functions accessible within a small footprint The LINE Rich Menu takes up only about a third of the screen, avoiding interference with the chat content and main view, while still keeping frequently used functions within reach — reducing cognitive load and the chance of mis-taps.

2. Show a different Rich Menu depending on login state The system automatically switches the Rich Menu content based on the member’s login status. When logged out, it emphasizes registration, device lookup, and AED training content; once logged in, it shifts to personalized functions like case reporting, coverage area, and a member center.

3. Make the member center more than just an account page Beyond basic profile management, the member center also integrates a personal coverage area, mission history, assistance count, and personal achievements. Users can more intuitively see their own participation history and accumulated impact, boosting their motivation to stay engaged.

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Automated push notifications: a critical piece of event tracking

For message notifications, we broke this into two core requirements, both solved using the LINE Messaging API:

1. Not just mass broadcasting — precise targeting The system can automatically push notifications to the appropriate users based on conditions like region, coverage area, and member status, making notifications more timely and relevant, and avoiding the disruption of irrelevant alerts.

2. Continuing to track response after a case occurs After receiving a notification, users can report whether they’ve arrived on scene to help. The back office continuously tallies actual attendance, response rates, and case-handling status — so the system doesn’t just send notifications, it genuinely tracks what happens after.

Image source: Hear AED LINE Official Account

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The system growing alongside its user base

As Emson tirelessly promoted the platform and its LINE account user base grew, we continued taking in new requirements and turning them into practical new features, making the system better and better over time.

• Membership system: awards points based on activity level, like number of times someone showed up on scene, building community identity
• Professional identity/certification verification: distinguishes general members of the public from medical professionals, with professionals unlocking advanced functionality
• Real-time on-scene reporting: responders can post live updates, giving others visibility into on-scene conditions
• Back-office automation: automated scheduling for things like tagging, certification expiration, and review status, so staff can quickly get the key information they need

A well-designed system is one that can keep expanding its feature set — every change comes from careful, deliberate logic planning to avoid conflicts as versions evolve.

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The core lesson from this project

Technology always has to come back to “how will people actually use this.” A LINE Official Account isn’t the coolest solution, but it’s the one most likely to actually get used.

The challenge with nonprofit projects is limited resources paired with an unusually high cost of error. We spent a lot of time on this project deciding “what not to build” — every feature we cut was in service of making the core flow more stable, faster, and easier to use in an emergency.

In the end, the system is just a means to an end. Getting help to every person who goes down, faster — that’s the goal.