How Far Is Too Far? What AED Placement Research Says About Your Building
Short answer: There is no single national rule for how far an AED may be from a person who needs it. The working measure used by researchers and program guidance is time, not feet: a responder should be able to leave the patient, reach the nearest AED, and return within about three minutes. Research presented at the European Emergency Medicine Congress on September 25, 2026 found that only about 30 percent of 28,349 real cardiac arrests occurred within 500 meters of a registered fixed AED. You can test your own site with a phone timer and a floor plan.
A study out of Paris made the rounds this week because it involved drones. The drones are the least useful part of it for anyone running a building in the United States right now.
Underneath the aviation headline is a plain finding about distance that applies to a school campus, a distribution center, a multi-floor office, and a church with a separate hall. It is also a finding you can verify or disprove on your own site this afternoon, without buying anything.
What The Paris Study Actually Found
At the European Emergency Medicine Congress in Paris on September 25, 2026, a team led by Dr. Hillary Minka of LariboisiĆØre Hospital presented a computer simulation built on 28,349 out-of-hospital cardiac arrests recorded across seven departments of the Ćle-de-France region between 2011 and 2024.
The headline result: a drone network could put an AED within reach of more than 95 percent of those arrests inside five minutes, against 30 to 40 percent using the road network, cutting average time to a device by 3.76 minutes. A configuration of 200 drone bases combined with 871 fixed AED sites reached 99.4 percent coverage.
The researchers are careful about what this is. No drones were flown. Travel times were estimated in straight lines, without regulatory, weather, or operational constraints. They state plainly that prospective real-world study is needed before any of it is settled.
Set all of that aside and one number remains, and it needs no aviation at all.
Only about 30 percent of the 28,349 recorded cardiac arrests happened within 500 meters of one of the region's 1,893 registered fixed AEDs. Everywhere else, the device was simply too far away to matter.
That is a placement-density problem, and it does not require a drone to fix. The research team also modeled the non-aviation version: adding 910 more fixed cabinets, for 3,605 devices across the region, would bring 84.5 percent of cases within the 500-meter threshold.
Why Time Is The Right Measure, Not Device Count
The question facilities teams usually ask is how many AEDs a building needs. It is the wrong unit.
Two devices in a building can be worse than one, if both are mounted near the main entrance because that is where the electrician was working. A single device in a genuinely central position can outperform three clustered in an administrative wing. Count does not describe reach.
Time does. During a cardiac arrest, the person who runs for the AED is usually the second or third person on scene, and they are running in a building they may not know well, past doors that may be closed. What matters is the round trip: patient to device to patient. Every second of that round trip is a second compressions are either not happening or being done by someone who is now alone.
The widely used planning target is a round trip of about three minutes or less. It is not a legal threshold, and no federal rule sets it. It is a design constraint that comes out of how quickly survival odds fall in the first minutes of an arrest, and it is the number most program guidance is built around.
The Walk Test: Ten Minutes, No Budget
This is the entire method. It requires a phone, a floor plan, and one other person.
| Step | What to do |
|---|---|
| 1. Pick the far corner | Start at the farthest point in the building that people actually occupy. Not the roof. The last office, the back of the warehouse, the far end of the field. |
| 2. Start the timer and walk | Walk briskly to the nearest AED. Do not jog and do not take a shortcut you would not take at 2am. |
| 3. Open the cabinet | Actually open it. If it is alarmed, locked, behind a badge reader, or blocked by a cart, the time you are measuring is fiction. |
| 4. Walk back and stop the timer | The round trip is the number. Anything over three minutes is a gap, not a preference. |
| 5. Repeat from three other corners | Each floor, each detached structure, each outdoor space in use. Write the times on the floor plan. |
Run it with someone who does not know where the AED is. That version measures what a real retrieval looks like, and it usually adds thirty to sixty seconds nobody had accounted for.
What 500 Meters Looks Like In American Buildings
Five hundred meters is about 1,640 feet, or roughly three city blocks. In practice, here is where that threshold tends to break.
- School campuses. The device is in the main office. The arrest happens on the practice field, in the field house, or in a portable classroom on the far side of the lot. Athletics is where the risk concentrates and the main office is where the AED usually lives.
- Distribution centers and plants. A single AED near the front office serves a floor that can run 1,000 feet end to end, with racking that turns a straight line into a maze.
- Multi-floor offices. Vertical distance is the one people underestimate. Waiting for an elevator during a fire-alarm-adjacent commotion is not a three-minute trip, and stairwells in a tower are slow in both directions.
- Churches with a separate hall. The sanctuary has the device. The fellowship hall, gym, or school building across the parking lot does not, and that is where the weeknight activity happens.
- Outdoor athletic fields and parks. Often served by a device inside a building that locks at the exact hours the fields are busiest.
The Five Placement Mistakes That Create Dead Zones
None of these are equipment problems. All of them are design problems, and all of them are cheap to fix relative to buying another device.
The locked office. The AED is mounted inside an administrative suite that is secured after 5pm. The building is occupied until 9pm.
The badge-access corridor. A visitor or a contractor cannot get to it. The people most likely to witness an arrest in a public area are often the people with the least access.
The stairwell-only route. A device one floor away is not one floor away if the connecting door is fire-rated, alarmed, and closed.
The seasonal building. The concession stand with the AED is shuttered from November to March, while the gym next door runs all winter.
The device nobody can name. Placement is only half of reach. If an employee who has worked there six months cannot point at the nearest AED without being walked to it, the effective distance is however long it takes to find someone who can.
Turning The Walk Test Into A Placement Map
The output of this exercise should be one page per site, and it should survive staff turnover.
- A floor plan with every AED marked, by model and serial number.
- Round-trip times written at each corner you tested, with the date you tested them.
- Every zone over three minutes circled, with a one-line note on why: distance, locked door, badge access, or vertical travel.
- The access hours of each space, because a device that is reachable at noon and unreachable at 8pm is two different devices.
- The remedy for each circled zone, ranked. Relocating an existing device, changing a lock or cabinet, and adding a device are three different costs, and they are usually available in that order.
That page is also most of what you need to register each device with 911 dispatch, and most of what a Q4 budget request needs in order to sound like a measurement rather than a preference.
What To Do With This
Run the walk test from four corners of your largest site this week and write the times down. If every round trip comes in under three minutes, you have a documented result and a good answer for your next safety review. If one comes back at five, you have found something that no amount of equipment quality closes, and you found it on a Tuesday instead of during an emergency.
Placement is a design decision, not a purchasing one. We have specialized in AEDs and AED program management since 2003, and it is our only business. If your walk test came back over three minutes and you want a second set of eyes on the layout, call us at 888-541-2337.
Related Reading
- How Many AEDs Does a Building Need? The One-Per-Floor Rule for Multistory Sites
- AED Cabinet & Mounting Requirements: ADA Height, Alarms, Signage
- Outdoor AED Placement: What Parks, Ball Fields And Trails Need That Indoor Cabinets Do Not
- Is Your AED On The Map? How AED Registration Connects Your Device To 911
Sources And Further Reading
- European Society for Emergency Medicine, press release ā Drones could speed up delivery of automated external defibrillators to patients suffering cardiac arrest
- News-Medical, September 25, 2026 ā Drone-delivered AEDs could reduce defibrillation delays after cardiac arrest
- DroneXL, September 26, 2026 ā Paris Study: AED Drones Reach 95% of Cardiac Arrests in Five Minutes
The figures in this article belong to the research team that presented them and are reported here as their findings. The Paris study is a computer simulation, not a real-world trial, and its authors state that prospective study is needed. Nothing here is a statement about the performance of any particular device. This article is not legal advice and does not replace your state's AED requirements or a manufacturer's instructions for use. Make sure the people expected to use an AED have current training.
