NASA and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security are working on a new tool that could detect the faint heartbeat of a person trapped under piles of rubble in the wake of a disaster.
The technology, dubbed Finding Individuals for Disaster and Emergency Response (FINDER), could find people trapped under up to 30 feet of crushed material, this is almost as high as the famous Green Monster in Boston's Fenway Park. It could also detect a person buried under 20 feet of solid concrete, a NASA press release reported.
FINDER is based on remote-sensing radar technology that was originally developed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory to keep track of their spacecraft.
"FINDER is bringing NASA technology that explores other planets to the effort to save lives on ours," Mason Peck, chief technologist for NASA and principal advisor on technology policy and programs, said. "This is a prime example of intergovernmental collaboration and expertise that has a direct benefit to the American taxpayer."
The technology is currently undergoing testing and was demonstrated publicly today.
"The ultimate goal of FINDER is to help emergency responders efficiently rescue victims of disasters," John Price, program manager for the First Responders Group in Homeland Security's Science and Technology Directorate in Washington, said. "The technology has the potential to quickly identify the presence of living victims, allowing rescue workers to more precisely deploy their limited resources."
FINDER could beam microwave radar signals into disaster-zone rubble and interpret the signals that bounce back.
"Detecting small motions from the victim's heartbeat and breathing from a distance uses the same kind of signal processing as detecting the small changes in motion of spacecraft like Cassini as it orbits Saturn," James Lux, task manager for FINDER at JPL, said.
Both natural and unnatural disasters has the ability to mangle material in a way that could easily confuse survivor-searching radar, FINDER hopes to get around this problem. The device could employ advanced algorithms to isolate the signals from a person's repetitively heaving chest by "filtering out" other distractions.
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