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Team members:Ìý

• Shreyank Amartya
• John Bullock
• Spencer Curra
• Alex Fous
• Andrew Gans

Avalanche safety is becoming of increasing importance as the outdoor community explores the winter terrain more frequently. Currently there exist a variety of technological and educational techniques designed both to prevent and to manage human related avalanche burials. However, many of these technologies are hard to use, inaccurate, or have vast room for improvement. Despite the fact that backcountry winter activities are associated with some inherent risk, we believe that risk can be mitigated with the development of more sophisticated safety devices.

The most commonly used technology for avalanche safety is the avalanche beacon. It is not a preventative device but instead is designed to be used as backup protection in case the much more important educational and awareness techniques fail. The best way to prevent avalanche accidents is to avoid dangerous avalanche terrain, though sometimes winter sports make this unavoidable. Mitigating the risk is the most important goal. The beacon is essentially an RF transmitter/receiver device that aids in the search for buried victims. The beacon is widely adopted and standardized by the backcountry skiing/adventure community and can be an effective lifesaving device. Unfortunately these devices are far from perfect and often times do not provide sufficient means to locate buried victims fast enough. Burials are inherently time critical as most victims are unconscious or asphyxiated within a 10-15 minute window. Any reduction in the locating time of a beacon device could literally be the difference between life and death for an individual. The best way to reduce deaths and injuries is by teaching awareness and technology fundamentals to those who frequent the environment. In addition to educational awareness there still exists areas for improvement within the beacon device itself.

Despite the obvious need for superior mechanisms, the beacon device has remain largely unchanged since its invention in the late 1960s. Our goal for the semester is to improve upon the current beacon technology. We aim to create a device that meets the standard protocol and minimizes the time it takes to locate a buried individual. To do this we plan to improve upon three aspects of the current designs: the range of the device, adding sophistication so that the beacon can pinpoint the buried victim, and increasing the usability of the device. To accomplish these tasks we plan to employ a method of triangulation as well as a mechanism that increases the power output of the transmitter once buried. Both of these mechanisms could lead to a significantly reduced search time and eventually the possible saving of lives in a real world application.