Slashdot Mirror
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."
If Microsoft gets involved with these somehow, the Blue Screen of Death could really mean going blue and then dead... :P
Please God, let me find my blue hat with the red trim. (Frances Farmer)
Devices that give away your present position:
Are they
a) great because they let people find you when you're buried under gobs of snow, or
b) evil 'cause The System can use it to track you and make sure you're not doing something "subversive"
?
The answer, of course, is: c) both a and b.
Does anyone have a *good* way to get all of (a) (generalized that is, not just snow) without any of (b)?
(No, no, not a stupid law; I said a *good* way.)
Furry cows moo and decompress.
Many experienced climbers today complain about the presence of parties of rich people seeking the latest "extreme" sport, being driven or even helicoptered in to a suitable site near a mountain's peak. Cushy base camps featuring the latest in electronic entertainment gear, heated tents, and even portable jacuzzis are not uncommon even along the slopes of such forbidding mountains as Everest and K2.
And now comes life sign monitors, so the hired help can quickly dig some careless wannabe mountaineer out of a snowbank. Complete with body-orientation signals so a stray shovel won't hit their heads. Will these truly help save lives, or only encourage the foolhardy to risk theirs?
If I was a developer, I wouldn't touch a decision-making feature with a 20 foot pole. Even with Microsoft's (for example) legal team. Imagine the lawsuits! There would be people saying the computer made the wrong decision, and even worse, there could be bugs which make fatal mistakes.
Somehow if a loved one is dead, I really wouldn't want to hear "Well, there's a patch for that now..."
What makes a man want to be a mouse? (Python's Flying Circus)
you don't know what your missing out on!
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
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.
You can find more information about the project on Bernt Schiele's Group Homepage at
/.'ers
http://www.vision.ethz.ch/projects/
Merry Xmas to all of you
A skier was left buried for several months without recieving assistance because he refused to sign the EULA of his wireless dealy.
His last words were, "Damn you Clippy this isn't funny!"
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
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.
Lousy in Practice. Simply stated, most avalanche victims are killed from blunt-force trauma.
Suffice to say, being dragged down a mountain by a wall of snow going 200 miles an hour, carring assorted debris (rock, ice, other mountaineers, AOL CD's, etc.), hitting various hard objects along the way (rock, ice, other mountaineers, RIAA/MPAA representatives, etc.), is not good for one's health.
Asphyxiation still represents a problem. But most are killed by the spin-cycle.
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
I got more rhymes than Jamaica got Mangoes.
Gadgets are fun, but getting away from too many gadgets is one more reason to go skiing.
If multiple people are buried, you have much bigger problems than triage. With an avalanche transceiver, you find a buried victim by finding their transceiver -- well, duh. But this is done by measuring the relative signal strength, usually through an audible beep from the buried transceiver or sometimes from an LED display on the receiver. Of course, signal strength can vary bewilderingly depending on how deeply the victim is buried, the orientation of the antenna on the transmitting and receiving transceivers, and whether the victim and their pack are obscuring their transceiver.
This is complicated. It isn't something you can figure out in the minutes after an avalanche. Lots and lots of practice is required to get any degree of competence.
If you have multiple burials, you are almost always forced to go after the strongest signal first -- often you can't even "hear" the other signals until you find the strongest one. This implies to me that having vital signs is rarely going to enter into the decision-making process on whom to recover first.
For backcountry skiers, I usually feel that if you have a multiple burial situation you've already screwed up.
This might be of moderate use to avalanche control people (now there is a great job, explosives and skiing combined!), ski patrollers, heli-ski guides, and maybe mountain rescue organizations. As a product for the casual outdoorsperson I'm pretty skeptical.
The military already has combination 'locator + vitals transmitter' for troops.
:-) Merry Christmas to those celebrating, Happy Wednesday to everyone else!
But can you imagine (no, not a Beowulf Cluster) a fire department with these? The fire chief would know exactly where inside the burning building his firemen are, and more importantly, he would know how they are doing.
100 firemen die (on average) a year, over 80% of the firemen in the US are volunteers. Wouldn't it be a good use of 'homeland security money' to get this technology out of the pentagon (and the land of chocolate, numbered bank accounts, and red pocket knives) and into one of the most hazardous work environments?
Ok, I'm getting off my soapbox.
My father is a blogger.