Hi Tech, Wireless Help for Climbers

Mark Baard writes "Alpinists may soon be using wearable sensors and tricorder-like medical scanners to bail out their buried comrades. Computer scientists Bernt Schiele and Florian Michahelles, at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, are designing A-Life, a portable device that transmits and receives avalanche victims' vital signs through snow, up to 80 meters away."

Comments

Re:Personal Locators

[Trane Francks]

b) evil 'cause The System can use it to track you and make sure you're not doing something "subversive"

LOL! Man, now I have really read it all. If you'd bothered to read the article, you might have noted that the tools would enable locating and getting critical health information up to 80 metres away. For The System to use this for their subversive and privacy-invading gain, they'd have to be 80 metres or less away from their target.

I got news for you...if The System is 80 metres-or-less away from you, they don't need no steenkin' fancy climber-tracking system to cap your ass. The technology to close-monitor targets has been around for decades.

But, yeah, I hear ya, man. When you're dilly-dallying over the Hillary Step, you gotta be prepared for those loitering Sherpas to take advantage of your low O's and diminishing stamina. They don't call it The Death Zone for nothing, ya know.

Re:This may increase danger

[Longjmp]

IMO, those kind of devices are most likely to increase the number of idiots who will take more and more risks to go to areas where no responsible alpinist would go. We already have enough "thrill-seeking" snowboarders, skiers and climbers who are buried in avalanches every year.

However, even the most experienced alpinist can get into a situation which (s)he didn't foresee, and be it because of another idiot chosing the same route and causing disaster.

Maybe such device shouldn't be available for sale. Instead, they could be available for rent (or free even) at local bases, requiring to leave the groups' intended routes. Responsible alpinists and skiers would benefit. Irresponsible morons, sorry to say that, would remain candidates for the darwin award.

Knowing a Victim's Vitals Good For Rescuers

[n8]

I have been a ski patroller at a small local area for 9 years now and I had the unfortunate privelidge of being on the mountain when a fellow ski patroller was killed in an avalanche during Avalache Control. What nobody knew at the time was that the patroller that was killed was buried in such a way that he had no air pocket and most likely died within the first 3 minutes of being buried. Yet, the rescue team put themselves into a position where they were attempting save someone in very hazardous avalanche conditions who was actually already dead. The rescue team actually set off more avalanches accidentally and partially buried members of the team.

Rescue attempts like this are always extremely dangerous for the people involved. If they had some way of knowing whether the person was alive it would be very valuable information when trying to make the decision whether or not to risk other people's lives in order to save a buried person.

Re:This may increase danger

[weave]

... or it will enable the hired help to say "Screw it, he's dead" and change it from a rescue to a recovery!

I read some article a few years ago that the then-fairly-new portable cell phones were enabling yuppies to hike up big mountain's like the White Mountains, then get stuck or exhausted and call 911 for a sky lift down and what a pain they had become for park rangers.

Which reminds me, last October my friends and I hiked up Picacho Peak near Tucson. I'm 43, and while I walk a lot, the three mile hike (so far) was doing a number on my heart and fatigue so I stopped before hitting the top. I was not going to go beyond my limits. The others went on and yeah, I regret it now, but it gives me incentive to go back after I train some more, get some proper gear like gloves for the steel rope climbs and ropes to haul the 9 liters of water we took (which was all on *my* back and made balance going up rock faces very difficult). My mistake was that, since this was a state-park maintained trail, I figured it wouldn't be all that tough. As pics like in the link above show, there were a few almost vertical climbs up rock faces using steel ropes set away from the rock by about two-foot I hooks we had to go up. (I did make it up the biggest set at least! :)

But there was no way I was going to go beyond my limits and then call 9-1-1 like a typical out-of-shape computer geek who doesn't know his limits...

(But yeah, I am still getting teased for being a pussy. Male bonding rituals are the best! :)

Durability?

[Flagbrew]

Through the voluminous amounts of information provided in the article, and more importantly the ETH (is that the manufacturer?) website I was able to glean... absoultely nothing that would convince me to switch to this system. I completly agree with Florian Michahelles, that "augmenting" our current beacons, which incidentally not a very high percentage of mountaineers are wearing anyway, with sensors is an excellent idea. But come on, that compaq whatever it is, looks as durable as uncooked bacon in the jaws of a hundred pound malamute. I will continue to wear my F1, thank you very much.

Re:Huh?

[belloc]

for those of us not steeped in the terminology of computer science

Bwuh...hate to break it to you, but a tri-corder is a Star Trek thingy. It was the do-all handheld for Bones, Kirk, Spock and the rest. Has nothing to do with CS.

Belloc