When someone collapses in cardiac arrest, the ambulance is rarely what saves them. A bystander is. In October 2025, the Grand Ducal Fire and Rescue Corps (CGDIS) turned that principle into national infrastructure with the launch of Staying Alive LU, a citizen-responder platform built and operated by Staying Alive.
The problem CGDIS set out to solve
Around 550 people suffer a cardiac arrest each year in Luxembourg. Roughly 70% of those arrests happen in front of witnesses. Only 7% of victims survive.
The arithmetic behind that gap is brutal: after the first few minutes, every minute without chest compressions costs about ten percentage points of survival probability. In practice, the outcome is usually decided before any emergency vehicle reaches the address. A country can optimise its response times, but it cannot beat physics. What it can do is turn the people already standing next to the victim into the first link in the chain of survival.
That requires two things a rescue service does not get for free: a defibrillator register that reflects reality on the ground, and a population of volunteers who can be reached, selected and guided in seconds.
A national programme, procured competitively
CGDIS ran a competitive tender covering both sides of that problem. Staying Alive was selected as the provider of the solution for managing defibrillators and citizen responders throughout the Grand Duchy.
It was our first international contract, awarded on the strength of more than ten years spent operating the same model at national scale in France.
What we delivered
Four components, all in production under the Staying Alive LU brand:
Native iOS and Android apps. Volunteer registration, alert reception, navigation to the victim and to the nearest defibrillator, plus embedded tutorials on recognising cardiac arrest, performing chest compressions and using an AED. Free, and deliberately usable by people with no first-aid certificate.
The national defibrillator database and its back office. Not just a map. A managed register with an administration interface for CGDIS, and a crowdsourcing loop that lets citizens declare, confirm or correct an AED entry. A national AED register decays continuously as devices are moved, removed or left with flat batteries, so the maintenance mechanism matters more than the initial import. Luxembourg’s register currently holds 1,408 devices.
The alerting and geolocation engine. Selection of the closest available responders, dispatch, routing to the nearest accessible defibrillator, and tracking of the mobilisation.
A trilingual public website and volunteer onboarding. French, German and English, which is the minimum viable set for a country where a large share of the working population lives across a border.
Built to fit the dispatch centre, not to replace it
This is the part that matters most to anyone weighing up a national programme.
The alert is initiated by the 112 dispatcher, from a dedicated interface, at the point where the call is qualified as a suspected cardiac arrest. CGDIS did not have to modify, replace or re-procure its call-handling system to launch the programme, and a trained human stays in the loop on every mobilisation.
That design choice is what allowed a national citizen-responder network to go live in months rather than in a multi-year systems-integration programme. It is also what keeps the door open: deeper automation is an upgrade, not a precondition.
The first cross-border citizen-responder network in Europe
The Luxembourg and French platforms are fully interoperable. A cardiac arrest on either side of the border can mobilise the responders who are genuinely closest to the victim, whichever country they happen to be registered in, and both networks draw on defibrillator data that does not stop at the frontier.
That is not a cosmetic feature. Around 250,000 people cross into Luxembourg for work every day, and along a border the nearest qualified pair of hands is frequently in the other country. Any system that treats a national boundary as the edge of the map will send a responder past a closer one and lose minutes that decide the outcome.
Getting there is a data and governance problem as much as a technical one: two national registers, two regulatory environments, two rescue services, one clinical clock. Building both platforms on the same foundations is what made it tractable.
Live since 16 October 2025
Staying Alive LU has been available on the App Store and Google Play since 16 October 2025, backed by CGDIS communication relayed by communes across the country.
What this means beyond Luxembourg
The clinical problem is identical everywhere. The constraints are local: the language mix, the dispatch architecture already in place, the data-protection regime, the legal status of a volunteer who intervenes. A platform that adapts to those constraints without being rebuilt is what makes a national deployment realistic, and what makes the next border crossable.
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