Last Sunday, a new tool that may revolutionize urgency humanitarian aid was put the finishing touches: a breath detector, able to find people covered with rubble
After a bomb attempt or a natural disaster, the first hours are very crucial to save lives. NGOs, first-aid or relief teams try everything to confront the reality and help the surviving. Most of the time, they lack means to be fully effective, which makes the death toll heavy. This breath detector can identify organic traces that come from missing people when they breathe, sweat or urinate. "Such a device can be used on the field without any laboratory support. It should enable first-aid and humanitarian teams to look for signs coming from living people covered with rubble, at a wide scale and for a long period of time", Professor Paul Thomas, from the British University in Loughborough, who invented this detector, sums up.
The Red Helmets Foundation also contributes to create innovations, in order to strengthen abilities of the teams on the field. Indeed, MISSING.NET, an international search engine for missing people, was launched a few days after the Tsunami in Japan. Emergesat, a satellite container was implemented in Port au Prince, a few hours after the earthquake that stroke Haiti, in order to establish an emergency local communication network.
