Finding Heartbeats in Rubble | National Geographic

good morning ladies and gentlemen and
welcome to Virginia Task Force Ones
urban search and rescue training center
shortly you’re gonna see two of our
highly trained technical search
specialists actually using the finder
device to assist them in finding a
person that’s buried inside our rubble
pile FEMA had identified a problem with
increasing the speed of searches in mass
disasters like Haiti or Sandy where they
would like to be able to more quickly go
through and detect victims buried in
rubble well this project finder began as
a lot of projects do as science we
invested in some technology that would
be helpful for measuring the surface
waves on the earth also for detecting
spacecraft and as they move out in the
solar system and some engineers noticed
that that’s the same technology that we
could also use to detect human heart
beats like a detect microwave heart
beats that’s a sure sign of a victim as
a heartbeat it uses microwave radar to
scan the pile well actually go through
the different cement wood frame houses
pretty much anything it’ll go ahead and
scan it pulls back in like a regular
radar it’ll go ahead and bring back the
signal and we’re measuring the micro
movements or small moons of the chest
wall from the heartbeat and from the
respirations even from the the from your
head when you have the arteries in your
head the biggest advantage of this is
number one is that it detects
unconscious and unresponsive victims the
other advantage of this is that
potentially you could have a number of
people who are out collecting the data
and all bringing it back to search team
so you could potentially have multiple
radars gathering their information
together so you can search the site
faster and have unskilled people using
the finder device and finding live
victims that don’t have tremendous
amounts of skill using canines
you don’t have canines or that are the
listening devices or the cameras one of
the time comes pulled out turn it on
very easy to use and they can detect
what someone there or not this team
working with here is the best of the
best
Fairfax County task force one that’s
probably the best in the world and we’re
working with them you know because they
get a lot of practice they go
international
the first responders have given us a lot
of useful feedback they’ve actually been
good because they’ve been very critical
in terms of identifying things that just
make it less usable than they would like
and we’ve responded that and changed the
prototype in response to that do I see
on here to know that actually there is a
communication established well any piece
of equipment that helps us find victims
we’ll be glad to take a look at and so
this is just one piece of equipment
that’s you know new to us and so we’re
just you know taking a look at it
evaluate this in general I think they’re
encouraged by it it’s a game-changing
technology it’s detects things a totally
different way it’s another tool in the
toolbox the search and rescue personnel
they are very focused on finding the
victims and this is something that helps
them do that they want to rescue people
they want to save lives
you