New App Developed to Locate People in Areas without a Phone Signal
From: RUVID - 12/28/2017

Researchers at the University of Alicante (UA) in Spain have developed a
mobile phone application to locate people who have suffered an accident in
remote sites lacking a phone signal. The app "can be incorporated to any
smartphone and without a signal, emits a Wi-Fi signal which in turn acts as a
distress beacon over a distance of several kilometers," says UA professor
Jose Angel Berna. He notes signal detection is facilitated with a portable
receptor featuring an antenna that links to the smartphone of the search
party. Following an accident, the victim can activate the app, which
transmits the distress signal periodically, providing location coordinates.
Berna says the system can enable the optimization of searches and decrease
tracking time, which is crucial when taking into account that "in the case of
many deceased people, autopsies have revealed that they survived for several
hours and did not die instantly, but it had been impossible to locate them on
time."

Read the entire article at:
https://phys.org/news/2017-12-app-people-areas.html

Link:
The Network of Valencian Universities for the Promotion of R&D (RUVID)
http://ruvid.org/wordpress