The founders of the SMS lifeguard app received the 2024 Innovation and Utility Award

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Mr Jacob Hollenberglecturer Matthias Ring And assistant professor Leif Svensson Received the 2024 Innovation and Exploitation Award.

They grew the company together Heart runner. Their technology and app aims to improve people's life-saving possibilities. This is done through an SMS application, which alerts volunteers called “rescuers” to the location where someone has gone into cardiac arrest. Volunteers perform life-saving measures, increasing the chances of saving the life of a person who has had a cardiac arrest.

The award committee’s justifications stated the following: “Jacob Hollenberg, Matthias Ring and Leif Svensson have conducted research in the field of cardiac arrest for 20 years. They developed an idea to alert civilian volunteers to the location of a cardiac arrest using an application on their mobile phones. The purpose of the alert system was to increase the proportion of patients receiving early life-saving interventions in the form of Cardiopulmonary resuscitation and defibrillation, thus greatly improving the chances of survival. Through curiosity, initiative, entrepreneurship and perseverance, they succeeded in proving the utility of the system, and through the company they started – Heartrunner – they succeeded in implementing it in large parts of Sweden and throughout Denmark. Their innovation affects thousands of people every year who suffer cardiac arrest outside of hospital. More than 250,000 participants have joined the project and presented research data in prestigious journals. Their data has also led to international recommendations to alert volunteer rescuers across Europe.