NASA’s www.nasa.gov radar technology designed to detect heart beats of victims trapped in wreckage, enabled crews to rescue four men in the village of Chautara in Nepal. The radar technology a small suitcase-sized device is called “Finding Individuals for Disaster and Emergency Response” or referred to as FINDER.
FINDER is a collaboration between NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) www.jpl.nasa.gov in Pasadena, California and the Department of Homeland Security’s Science and Technology Directorate www.dhs.gov/science-and-technology.
The California Institute of Technology (Caltech) www.caltech.edu in managing JPL for NASA, has licensed a version of the technology to R4 Incorporated in Edgewood Maryland www.r4-inc.com and to SpecOps Group Inc. www.specopsbrand.com in Sarasota, Florida.
R4 took two prototypes of FINDER to Nepal to assist with relief efforts and joined with an international contingent of search and rescue personnel from China, the Netherlands, Belgium, and members of the Nepali Army in Northern Nepal to help find the four men in Chautara.
FINDER sends a low-powered microwave signal which is about one-thousandth of a cell phone’s output through rubble. The device looks for changes in the reflections of those signals coming back from tiny motions caused by victims’ breathing and heartbeats. FINDER has detected heartbeats through 30 feet of rubble or 20 feet of solid concrete.
Rescue workers using a rugged laptop to run FINDER software, can specify a minimum and maximum range for detecting heartbeats in the vicinity. FINDER detects the small motions using algorithms similar to those that JPL uses to measure the orbits of satellites at Jupiter and Saturn or to measure changes in the Earth’s surface from orbiting satellites. The device then displays the detected heart and respiration rates and reliability scores.
There are many potential uses for FINDER in medicine as well. A device based on FINDER could monitor the vital signs of someone trapped in a car or quarantined with an extremely contagious disease such as Ebola. By using the technology, it would be possible for first responders to measure a patient’s heartbeat without having to physically touch them.