Soft One Way Valve Integrated into a Inflatable Life Preserver
According to the World Health Organization, an estimated 236,000 people die from drowning each year, representing approximately 7% of all injury-related deaths. Moreover, drowning accounts for 75% of fatalities during floods. A major challenge in such emergencies is the delay in search and rescue operations—first responders often take considerable time to reach flooded areas. Yet, the window to save a drowning person is extremely narrow—typically just three minutes.
To address this issue, we have developed the Pnuematic Limiter, a one-way valve that can be attached to an inflatable life preserver that can be deployed with no additional hardware. During testing it was shown that it would also automatically deploy when the pressure inside the life preserver was greater than the pressure outside, causing the limiter to be pushed out of the deployer. This allows the life preserver deployment mechanism to be incredibly small and light weight when compared to a traditional life preserver, potentially allowing a single drone to carry dozens of life preservers.
Sadly, in November of 2021, the project no longer received funding, and I was unable to continue. The plans were to develop a pneumatic multiplexer to allow a drone to carry up to fifty of these devices. However, testing did reveal that not only could the device self-deploy, but the inflated mock life preserver could stay inflated for two days.