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Breath Detector To Help Find Earthquake Survivors
bazzalunatic writes "With all the recent earthquakes, this 'human-sniffing' device couldn't be more timely. Developed in the UK, the new machine detects the breath and sweat of survivors trapped in rubble. It's better than sniffer dogs, and could reduce the risk to them. From the article: 'The sensor technology was shown to accurately detect human-generated carbon dioxide and ammonia in air that wafted through gaps in the rubble during testing, something that previously only dogs could do, as other technologies focus more heavily on seeing or hearing a survivor.'"
You've managed to touch briefly on actually interesting, real science. Humans automatically compensate for increased CO2 by adjusting their breathing and their metabolic levels. Curiously, humans can only detect the presence of carbon dioxide in the blood but not the absence of oxygen. This has lead to deaths in high nitrogen environments or other environments where there's very little oxygen, since people have no warning sign that they aren't getting enough oxygen. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nitrogen_asphyxiation. Death due to lack of oxygen is pleasant compared to suffocation because the body does not go into the normal panic that occurs from too much carbon dioxide. So things just shut down.
...technology for skynet to use when hunting us in the future. Keep up the good work!
It's better than sniffer dogs
Highly misleading. It eliminates dangers to the dogs/handlers and simplifies logistics; the article doesn't even imply that the device is more effective than dogs. It also points out that dogs are more agile and will still be more useful in areas where the machine or its human operator can't easily go (which I imagine will be a lot of places, considering that they're *digging through rubble*).
There are dogs out there that can detect cancer, for Christ sake; don't be so quick to dismiss biology in favor of technology, especially considering that a merging of the two is probably our next great frontier.
P.S. If any suspicious or sardonic person out there wants to argue that cancer dogs are some stupid myth, read the studies cited in this wikipedia article: they may be small studies, but I'm not inclined to doubt a study of a diagnostic tool showing a specificity >90% until I see a directly contrary scientific result or a damn good argument about the design of the original study.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canine_cancer_detection
Except that the cell phone doesn't give any indication that the person it's with is alive or not. That's why they're called "survivors".
I'd be willing to bet that there's a number of easier to smell things than CO2 "wafting" up out of rubble with a survivor that's been in there for days.
Lets drop the PC talk and get down to brass tacks. By day 3 any survivor is going to be quite ripe in a number of ways and their bad breath is going to be the last thing you notice.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
and since practically everyone nowadays carry sophisticated personal radio beacons (aka "cell phones")
There is the problem of battery life. Signal penetration through tons of rubble. Transponders out of service and so on.
Sounds like an improved version of the detectors used to find illegal immigrants hidden in trucks. If it works It'll probably see much more use by customs that the rescue people.