Proof of Life
Written by MICHAEL BURNETT
VITAL INFORMATION FOR MEDICS IN COMBAT.
In the course of a battle, military medics must be able to discern quickly and accurately whether fallen warfighters have died or remain alive, so that they can best allocate their resources to assisting those who may still benefit from medical care.
This is not as simple as it might seem, as battle scenes can be hectic, and medics themselves are targets of enemy forces. So moving into a position to render care to someone who actually has been killed in action already may cost the life of a trained medic when the enemy is still present.
The Department of Defense has supported several initiatives to prevent such a situation by funding or purchasing devices that enable warfighters to detect if their comrades are still alive from a distance. These devices read vital signs, detect breathing, or perform some other service to verify that fallen comrades are still alive without placing their operators in immediate jeopardy.
Recently, for example, The U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory awarded a contract to Planning Systems Inc., a subsidiary of QinetiQ North America, in Reston, Va., to develop a battlefield automatic life status monitor (BALSM). The BALSM contract, awarded May 11, would detect the “physiological status, location and activity” of fallen soldiers and “communicate that information to a soldier with medical training,” according to Planning Systems.
But while the Air Force waits for the development of that project to reach fruition, several devices for detecting life in various circumstances are now commercially available and often used by branches of the U.S. military.
STANDOFF DETECTION
Perhaps the most impressive achievement in standoff detection of vital signs comes from Sperient Inc. of Livermore, Calif.
Sperient CEO Tom Rosenbury was program manager of the Micropower Impulse Radio Program at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory on September 11, 2001. The laboratory had been working on research and development for handheld radar.
“We recognized that we could penetrate rubble,” Rosenbury recalled. “We were just doing R&D and putting together a system that could go through rubble and then 9/11 happened.” Air Force General Lester Lyles, familiar with this work at Lawrence Livermore, dispatched Rosenbury and others to use the handheld radar to attempt to find survivors under the rubble at the World Trade Center. Rosenbury arrived on September 13, 2001. Although no survivors were found after the first day of the attacks, Rosenbury and his team demonstrated that the concept of detecting life with handheld radar devices was possible.
Soon after, Lawrence Livermore suggested that Rosenbury privatize the technology, and so he formed Sperient and perfected the LifeDetector, a handheld device that can detect life at a distance under hazardous conditions. The screen of the LifeDetector returns vital signs, using microradar to detect heart motion, even through clothing, body armor and bulletproof vests.
The device currently holds the record for standoff detect at about 300 feet, Rosenbury told Military Medical Technology. This new LifeDetector device is an invaluable battlefield tool, he added. P.K. Carleton, former surgeon general of the Air Force, told Rosenbury once that an estimated 70 percent of medic casualties in the Vietnam War were incurred when medics tried to recover dead bodies, not realizing the soldiers had already died.
“We call it the Private Ryan mission,” Rosenbury remarked. “In Saving Private Ryan,” a sniper shoots one of the good guys. The good guy falls down in the middle of a courtyard. The question, is the guy alive or dead? If he’s alive, you want to do everything you can to recover him. But if he’s dead, you don’t want to waste anyone else’s life saving a dead body.”
The LifeDetector returns heartbeat and breathing rates on one screen and distance to the subject on another. Its portability makes it perfect for triage, search and rescue, and combat situations, according to Sperient.
An older version of LifeDetector refines the capability demonstrated in the aftermath of 9/11. It is used for penetrating rubble for the mission of locating unconscious or trapped victims of natural disasters. It can detect life up to 70 feet away through air.
RUGGEDIZED DEVICES
The U.S. military has been using the Onyx 9500 and the Onyx II 9550 finger oximeter devices to equip medics in farforward locations or in special forces with the ability to read vital signs of their patients. Nonin Medical Inc., based in Plymouth, Minn., has manufactured the devices with a focus on military use for the last several years, Terry deBruyn, Nonin Medical sales manager for specialty markets, told MMT.
“The finger oximeters are very small and light,” deBruyn noted. “We supply them in a hard protective case, which is quite small. That makes them very suitable to be packed in a rucksack for special forces medics and far-forward military medics that are either on-foot or parachuting in. They are very rugged.”
The Onyx 9550 weighs only 2 ounces and can operate for 21 hours continuously, running on two AA batteries. The device springs to life once a finger is inserted inside of it. The wide LED-viewing angle allows medics to read the stats on the Onyx screen quickly and easily.
The U.S. Army and U.S. Air Force have granted the devices airworthiness approval, indicating they are suitable for use on fixed- or rotary-wing aircraft that transport patients. The military first granted airworthiness approval to a larger device from Nonin Medical, the PalmSAT handheld pulse oximeter.
The PalmSAT runs on four AA batteries, and the 2500 series of the device offers 100 hours of battery life (only 45 hours from rechargeable batteries) while the 2500A offers six hours of battery life (only 40 hours from rechargeable batteries). The device weighs only 7.5 ounces and offers 72 hours of data storage. Its LED screen is large and easy to read, offering medics an option when ruggedized smaller devices are not as important.
Although the PalmSAT has been in use by U.S. military forces since 2003, the Onyx finger oximeters have sprung into much wider use since their introduction.
“You get the same information from all three of the devices; you get pulse rate and oxygen saturation,” deBruyn said. “On the finger oximeters, the oximeter is built into the sensor. With the PalmSAT, the oximeter is a handheld piece and then there is a sensor that attaches to it with a cable. The Onyx demonstrates miniaturization of the technology and condensing it into its smallest package.”
The Onyx II in its specialized military package assembly is called the 9550-MIL, which puts the device in its protective hard case.
REMOTE EMERGENCIES
Another device providing vital signs readings to military medics in remote locations is the VitalLink 1200, manufactured by TeleMedic Systems Inc. of Black Diamond, Wash. The company created the first VitalLink 12 years ago with the goal of providing non-medical specialists in remote areas with the means of being in touch with medical care any time of day.
Essentially, VitalLink monitors a range of vital signs and communicates that information over a communications platform to doctors who can use that information to advise on the care of a patient, Dr. Paul Tillotson, co-founder of TeleMedic Systems, told MMT.
“We can go from anywhere to anywhere,” Tillotson declared. “We can use landlines or cell phones or satellite phones. We have broadcast it over a system built by the Boeing Company called the Connexion, which is a broadband device on board some military aircraft.”
Boeing’s Connexion provides mobile broadband services such as data and voice to aircraft in flight. Connexion is in use by U.S. military and other government aircraft as well as major airlines.
The very first version of VitalLink was clunky and shaped like a briefcase. The current 1200 series comes in the shape of a backpack, weighing about 19 pounds. The company will begin manufacturing a new iteration of the device around mid-December; that device will weigh only 1 pound 9 ounces.
In an emergency, an operator can turn on the VitalLink 1200 and it would guide the user with voice prompts and onscreen instructions on how to set up the device to monitor a patient’s vital signs. The VitalLink monitors heart rhythm, blood pressure, blood oxygen levels, temperature and pulse. An operator connects the VitalLink 1200 to a communications link and pushes a button to connect it to a medical center. Medical personnel and the operator can relay voice and text messages through the device and send files and images as well.
“It is two separate pieces of equipment really,” Tillotson explained. “One is the communications device, which includes the computer. The other is the medical device. The present medical device can monitor a bunch of stuff, anything that can be connected wirelessly.”
The VitalLink 1200 has an option for an extended battery life, which provides up to nine hours of continuous operation with a fully charged battery. The battery only offers three to four hours of use after a shelf life of six months.
DEEP BREATHING
UltraVision Security Systems Inc., based in Salem, N.H., developed ground-penetrating radar systems, among other technologies, for roughly 35 years. Just over two years ago, the company took its radar capabilities and inverted them; instead of moving an antenna across the ground to search for stationary objects, it created a stationary antenna to seek out motion.
This motion detection capability, incorporated into the company’s LifeLocator device, is so sensitive that it can detect the movement of a person’s chest as he breathes at a rate of at least eight breathes per minute, Bill Lozon, vice president at UltraVision Security Systems, told MMT.
“It is a very good and highly precise motion detector,” Lozon described. “If a trapped victim or someone on another side of a wall can move an extremity in any way shape or form, shake a leg or rollover, the system will find them very quickly. If someone is unconscious or completely pinned, as long as he is breathing, we will find him to a depth of about 20 feet or 6 meters.”
Lozon stressed the device does not actually read vital signs, but its ability to sense the motion of breathing makes it an indispensable life-saving tool. The LifeDetector uses ultra-band radar to detect motion through its antenna and relays that information wirelessly to a handheld PDA. Search-and-rescue personnel use the devices to find living, trapped victims of a building collapse that may result from natural causes or terrorism.
“You put the antenna or sensor on the debris pile, and then you back off 15-20 feet with a handheld PDA and they communicate wirelessly,” Lozon said. “The searcher sees icons on the screen that indicate motion or breathing. We keep it very simple because folks don’t get a lot of training on this or they get it once a quarter and it doesn’t stick with them. Instead of looking at raw data or understanding radar signals, they see a circle or a square and that indicates motion or breathing.
“It is able to penetrate materials of about 20 feet through most everything except metal,” he added. “If someone is trapped under a car, I won’t see them. That’s just physics. Radar won’t penetrate metal. But it will penetrate most materials, including concrete.”
The system is in use by nations around the world as a search-and-rescue device, but Lozon has heard anecdotally that the Israeli military has an additional use for the LifeLocator.
“I think they use it more for SWAT applications than rescue applications. They are using it to sense motion through walls to find bad guys before they force entry into a building,” he recounted. ♦