Saving Children & Pets: Inspired By NASA Tech
While watching Savagegeese (a YouTube car review channel) this last week, I noted an unexpected space industry tie-in during the video. The host explained a technology that Toyota had just implemented in its latest Sienna minivan model to help prevent heatstroke, particularly in kids and pets. The technology, it turns out, was inspired by an application of a NASA JPL technology I’d written about back in 2017. The resulting product was supposed to help find earthquake victims buried in the rubble.
NASA dubbed the technology FINDER (Finding Individuals for Disaster and Emergency Response) and collaborated with the Department of Homeland Security in its development. FINDER uses microwave radar to detect a person’s heartbeat. It can detect a person’s heartbeat under 20 ft. (~6 meters) of solid concrete and 30 ft. (~9.1 m) of rubble.
Finder was first used in Nepal after the country's 2015 earthquake. The technology found four survivors out of the thousands who died in the quake. FINDER was used again in 2017 when Mexico, Ecuador, and Puerto Rico faced earthquakes and hurricanes. The company selling the technology didn’t provide any numbers of survivors resulting from its use after those natural disasters.
For those wondering about the space connection, NASA JPL initially used similar remote sensing technologies to locate spacecraft. Light was beamed out toward a spacecraft’s suspected location in that case. The time it took for the light to traverse the distance between the Earth and the spacecraft and its return (after bouncing off the spacecraft) gave a good idea of its distance from Earth. This method also means it’s not just the technology but the algorithm used to calculate the distance.
NASA engineers determined they could use similar algorithms and technology to answer DHS’s request for a device to detect heartbeats from a distance. The final product was FINDER, portable at 13 pounds (~6 kg), and could conduct scans within 30 seconds. Later models could also tether to smartphones and tablets.
When I first wrote about it, it was a fantastic and excellent tool for emergency responders. I still think it’s pretty nifty. Although NASA does not indicate whether FINDER is being used today (others have asked), it would have helped find survivors of the Fort Lauderdale, Florida condominium collapse in 2021. Maybe it was used, but the reporting doesn’t make it clear.
How does FINDER tie in with Toyota’s minivan? How does it help prevent heatstroke?
Toyota is attempting to address the latter, heatstroke, with technology incorporated into the former, the Sienna minivan.
Pediatric vehicular heatstroke occurs when a child is left unattended in a car that is exposed to the sun without air conditioning. It happens often enough that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) categorizes it as a “hot car death.” Over 1,000 children have died from a hot car death since 1998 through September 23, 2024. Slightly over half of those deaths are caused by people just forgetting children were in the car. Nearly a quarter are from children who somehow accessed the vehicle and locked themselves inside.
The statistics are for children, but pets also die from being alone in a hot car for too long.
Toyota’s newest models of Sienna minivans have a technology incorporated into the vehicle’s headliner called “Advanced Rear Seat Reminder” (ARSR). The device uses a 60 Gigahertz radar sensor that scans the cabin and informs the driver whether someone is somewhere in the back. It works for large and small people as well as pets. Like FINDER, Toyota’s ARSR relies on reflected energy to determine a person’s location. In Toyota’s case, the returning wavelengths provide data on movement, heartbeats, and respiration, so even a child hiding in the rear footwell would be detected.
Of course, once the minivan senses the person or pet (it takes less than 10 seconds to scan the cabin after the occupant has left the vehicle), it will try to get someone’s attention in the parking lot by escalating sounds from chirps to the horn. For those app-lovers, the minivan will communicate with the driver’s Toyota smartphone application to notify them that someone is still in the car.
The obvious FINDER tie-in for Toyota is the application of the technology–a radar that can detect a living thing’s heartbeat. Sure, Toyota’s system isn’t penetrating rubble and concrete tens of feet thick, but the system is another aid in preventing deaths, just like FINDER. It’s being implemented all becauseToyota was inspired by NASA’s FINDER and figured out a way to do something similar to save lives in its vehicles. FINDER technology was relatively large (even if it was portable), and Toyota wanted something smaller and less expensive for its cars, which is why development occurred as it did for ARSR.
ARSR development began a few months before a 2019 Toyota hack-a-thon. Hot car deaths and FINDER topics came up during a company Town Hall (around the 8:30 mark), which some of Toyota’s engineers took up as a challenge. During its development, it was initially called “Cabin Awareness.” In 2024, Toyota will sell its Sienna minivan with the ARSR system. The company doesn’t appear to want to classify it as a safety feature.
The Sienna appears to be experiencing dwindling sales, with Toyota selling over 54,000 in 2023 (its 4Runner sales were over double the Sienna’s that year). Still, that’s probably much more heartbeat-detecting radars than FINDER’s licensed manufacturers are selling. Considering the investment of talent, time, and resources put into ARSR, Toyota will undoubtedly install something like it in its other vehicles.
The company’s leadership probably heard about FINDER through NASA’s promotion of its Spinoff program. Other news sources have stories about it, but they seem to originate during the same time frame–2013-2017–which suggests that NASA’s Spinoff press releases may have increased FINDER’s public visibility during that time. That’s a good thing because, as with Toyota, the resulting product or service makes life better, whether through NASA technology or being inspired by it.
But it’s also a missed opportunity, and NASA doesn’t seem interested in following up on FINDER's success nearly a decade later. The space agency is always talking about its spinoff program’s high return on taxpayer dollars.
Finding out about FINDER and how it inspired others to make life better would be a great NASA showcase.
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