New tech to trace buried avalanche victim

LONDON, UK: A new system will help locate avalanche victims to within a few centimetres by hooking on to signals from Galileo, the future European satellite navigation system.

For skiers and snowboarders, there is nothing quite like being the first to make tracks in the virgin snow. But the flip side is the much greater risk of avalanches here.

Once buried under a mass of snow, a person's only hope of survival is if their location can be pinpointed within 30 minutes. Victims stand the best chance of being saved if the uninjured members of their group start searching for them immediately - but for that the buried victim needs to be wearing an avalanche beacon.

"In the experience of rescue teams, not everyone actually carries beacons," says Wolfgang Inninger of the Fraunhofer-Institute for Material Flow and Logistics.

"However, nearly everyone has a cellphone. This is why we decided to enhance our automatic geolocation system that works with Galileo, the future European satellite navigation system."

To do so, two new components have been added to the "avalanche rescue navigator" (ARN) - a cellphone location function and software that calculates the position of the buried victim on the basis of local measurements.

Starting from the approximate place where the victim is thought to be lying under the snow, the rescuers measure the field strength of the signal transmitted by the cellphone or beacon at three to five reference points, and the system then uses a highly precise calculation algorithm to pinpoint the source of the signal, indicating with high probability, the location of the buried victim.

In this kind of situation, the position relative to the rescue team's starting point is more important than the absolute position relative to global coordinates, which may be subject to measurement inaccuracies, says a Fraunhofer-Institute release.

This gives the rescuers immediate information on the direction and distance from their present location at which the victim can be found.

©IANS