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

Just think...

[GabrielStrange]

If Microsoft gets involved with these somehow, the Blue Screen of Death could really mean going blue and then dead... :P

Personal Locators

[MegaFur]

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.)

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.

This may increase danger

[flopsy mopsalon]

While any device that will help save lives is definitely welcome, the more bigger issue is whether these types of equipment won't actually increase the number of climbing deaths by encouraging inexperienced, overconfident, wealthy thrillseekers to try "bagging" a few "peaks".

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?

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! :)

Software making life and death decisions?

[tgrotvedt]

The article says that the software may or may not decide who to save in what order.

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..."

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: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

usefulness is questionable

[david_bonn]

[background: I am a frequent backcountry skier and have participated in avalanche rescues].

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.