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NASA’s Long-Range Heartbeat Detector Could Monitor Astronauts In Orbit

But for now, it's saving lives on Earth.
Image: NASA

FINDER is NASA's long-range heartbeat detector. Earlier this week, a prototype was used to find and then save four men trapped under ten feet of debris in Nepal. Today, an improved version is already being tested by Virginia Task Force One, an international emergency response team. One day, it could be used in outer space and in hospital emergency rooms here on Earth.

The technology behind FINDER has been around for a while—it uses microwave radar signals to detect motion by analyzing the resulting patterns when the signals bounce off of an object. The basic technique has been used by the Deep Space Network since 2005 to track the Cassini satellite as it orbits Saturn, for example. But in 2012, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory—NASA's groundbreaking research wing founded by a brilliant occultist—and the Department of Homeland Security teamed up to turn the technology's purpose towards disaster relief.

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"You can measure heartbeats and respiration systems without contact"

FINDER, short for Finding Individuals for Disaster and Emergency Response, is the result of this partnership. Roughly the size of a piece of carry-on luggage, it detects the miniscule motions generated by a heartbeat, or breathing, from meters away. In an open space, FINDER can detect these micro-scale motions from a distance of 30 meters. Through crushed debris, that distance is reduced to nine metres. But this is just the beginning for FINDER. True to NASA's mandate, it will go to to space—eventually.

"Now, we can fold back what we've learned here for future instruments for space applications," Jim Lux, task manager for the FINDER project, told me. "You could use it to monitor astronaut heartbeats on the space station. The advantage is that you can measure heartbeats and respiration systems without contact. We don't need to have wires hooked up, so if someone's floating in the space station, you can monitor them."

Today, FINDER faces its next official trial in relatively controlled conditions in Virginia. The version being tested is already more advanced than the prototype that was used to save the disaster victims in Nepal, Lux told me. Improvements include the ability to limit the detection range of the device, so that emergency responders can fine-tune the area they'd like to analyze with the device.

"Imagine sending someone to a hospital bed without having wires hooked up to them"

Medical applications are on the horizon, Lux said, and one unexplored application for FINDER is as a diagnostic tool in hospitals. "You have the possibility, for instance, for measuring a patient—or imagine sending someone to a hospital bed without having wires hooked up to them," said Lux. "That's a useful thing. Or, being able to look at people in a hospital emergency room and do some triage and see who needs help now."

In the mean time, much work remains to be done to improve and fine-tune FINDER's detection and signal analysis abilities. But it's worth remembering that FINDER went from a proposal to a working prototype in just three years—and according to Lux, that speedy development is thanks to a simple mandate of make-this-thing-fucking-work.

"They told us, 'Don't worry about making it smaller, worry about making it work,'" said Lux. "It has gone very well."