Here's something to do during those long, boring stretches waiting in the airport during the holidays: Visit a Coronary-Pulmonary Resuscitation or CPR kiosk and learn Hands-Only CPR. It only takes a few minutes; you don't even have to take off your shoes.

Fewer than half of the people who experience cardiac arrest outside of a hospital receive CPR.

The kiosks use a touch screen and a video program that briefly shows you the basics of CPR, followed by a practice session and a 30-second CPR test. There's a manikin or rubber torso provided to practice on and you're also given feedback afterwards about how well you performed during the test.

The first CPR kiosk the American Heart Association installed was in Dallas Fort-Worth International Airport in 2013. There are now 30 kiosks nationwide, with 16 of them in airports, mostly in the Eastern United States.

When researchers looked at how effective these kiosks were at teaching CPR, they found virtually no difference between the ability of people who used the kiosks and people who had taken a CPR class. Both groups did much better than those who had only watched a CPR video.

Over 45 percent of adults receive CPR for a cardiac arrest that happens outside of a hospital, but this percentage is much lower in rural, minority and low-income areas where fewer people know CPR. There are a number of reasons that some people find it difficult to learn CPR. Some are reluctant to perform mouth-to-mouth breathing (which is not used in Hands-Only CPR); for others, the cost of taking a class and the time that's involved in learning CPR are barriers.

There was virtually no difference between the ability of people who used the kiosks and people who had taken a CPR class.

The airport and other kiosks are free and take less time than boarding your plane probably does.

The study looked at nearly 750 people and compared those who took a 25-45 minute class to those who had a four-minute practice session with on-screen feedback at a kiosk and to those who watched a one-minute video. Everyone in the study took a 30-second compression test after their training and again three months afterwards.

Class and kiosk gave essentially similar results, and both were superior to video-only training. Video-only sessions are more effective at raising awareness than teaching the proper techniques, the study found.

“For a person with little or no medical training, Hands-Only CPR training kiosks can teach life-saving skills in just minutes,” said Debra G. Heard, lead author of the study and a consultant with the American Heart Association. “These kiosks have the potential to lower barriers to training, increase the likelihood a bystander would perform CPR and positively impact the likelihood of survival from cardiac arrest outside of a hospital.”

Visiting one, you could end up saving a life.

An article on the study appears in Annals of Emergency Medicine.