Cooperative system for avalanche rescue

Healthy life style has increased its penetration among people in the last years. The number of licenses for practicing snow and mountain activities certificates it with an over 7% increase year by year. Due to this, expert skiers or excursionist have slightly modified traditional patterns in their activities, moving from controlled zones, such as ski resorts or typical mountain paths, to non-protected zones, thus increasing the risk of suffering an avalanche. Over 150 people die buried by snow avalanches every year, in this scenario survival probabilities are tightly related with the time employed for finding victims, being critical the first 15 minutes. Most of the existing solutions require the presence of special elements not allowing the start of the rescue once the avalanche has finished, or when allows it, they are not as quick as needed in this kind of scenarios. This work presents an alternative solution focused on accelerating the detecting process and the rescue by facilitating its use with a very intuitive set of orders. Exploiting the possibilities offered by GNSS and ICT technologies (low power low range mesh networks), the system will be capable of detecting buried victims with only the information generated by the system. Furthermore, the context information provided by a control center accelerates the rescue process and optimizes the work of professional rescue team. This paper presents the theoretical basis of signal propagation through the snow and the set of functions implemented for accomplishing the system scope.