Four victims of the Nepal earthquake were discovered with the help of a new technological breakthrough. NASA JPL and Homeland security has been working hard to find survivors buried underneath the ground in Nepal.
An innovative device is getting ahead of itself by functioning at full power and working efficiently in real life situations. FINDER, or Finding Individuals for Disaster and Emergency Response is designed to detect heartbeats and breathing survivors trapped beneath more than 30 feet of garbage and concrete.
This little robot has its design based on the microwave radar technology. With the help of that, it looks for signs of life with one of its components pinpointing the person’s location within five feet. Also, FiNDER can find the difference between human heartbeats or living animals, saving precious hours of digging and researching.
By now, the efforts of supporting the victims of Nepal have been translated in Facebook calls for help, bringing people together to donate to relief efforts. Technology seems to have better results, concentrating on what matters, namely the living bodies that cry for help underneath the rubble.
FINDER is not the only device that has tremendous results in emergency situations. Researchers, scientists and engineers are turning satellite imagery into a crowd-sourced clearinghouse for damage data. Also they have started to send the popular drones into the wild landscapes of Himalaya. FINDER is the WALL-e of Nepal, a little rectangular box that penetrates more than 30 feet of debris, 20 feet of concrete or from 100 feet away in the open air. The best friend of life is supposedly one of the most efficient ways of suppressing the effects of one of the greatest disasters of our present times, by offering hope to the hopeless and literally giving life back to those who only cling to a thin thread of hope.
Presently, FINDER is just a prototype but it will soon be released on commercial markets by NASA. In the meantime, the guys are also using their satellites to design maps of remotely damaged areas in some small villages. Chautara, a small region in Nepal is benefitting from the intervention of the NASA Special Forces. At the same time, drones from Skycatch are flying above the skies of Nepal and taking high resolution photographs of the damaged areas. With real time information arriving continuously, technology becomes the man’s best friend. Nepal is one of the greatest disasters of the present, with hundreds of thousands of victims and huge areas of homeland devastated. Every effort to support life is much appreciated but above that, effectiveness lays in all the lives saved. FINDER seems to be one of the most promising aspects of life and technology nowadays.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.