I’ve been reading several articles over the past few days about how new and refurbished cell phones have been saving lives in the aftermath of the earthquake that hit Haiti last week.

Dan Woolley, an American filmmaker, was trapped for 65 hours in the ruble of the Port-au-Prince hotel with a severe gash in his leg and a head wound. While trapped, Woolley downloaded the American Heart Association and Jive Media’s Pocket First Aid & CPR app, which instructed him to use his shirt to make a tourniquet to stop the bleeding from his leg and to use his sock to stanch the bleeding coming from his head wound. The app also informed him that it would be dangerous to fall asleep if he felt himself going into shock, so he set the alarm on his phone to go off every 20 minutes to keep him awake.

The 4636 shortcode for Haiti relief has been saving lives on a daily basis as well. Anyone in Haiti in need of help can text their needs to 4636 and within ten minutes, action is taken. On Tuesday, a text was received from a school that had collapsed but when a rescue team responded to the message, they were unable to locate the building. A volunteer group in Boston, Ma quickly pinpointed the location of the origin of the text and relayed the information to a local rescue group in Haiti, who was then able to locate the fallen school. The coordinates in the message were accurate to five decimal places.