LALITPUR: Sagarmatha is one of the Nepalese names for Mount Everest. Every year on May 29, ‘Sagarmatha Diwas’ is celebrated to honor the mountaineering community and the people who lost their lives chasing the top of the world. It marks the day Tenzing Norgay Sherpa and Edmund Hillary first summited Mount Everest in 1953. In a world where technology can make hundreds of tons of weight float and can create a star on Earth, let’s explore how technology has paved the way up to 8848.86 meters above sea level.

Let me start with an interesting thing: Everest has its own private internet provider that connects the mountains; it’s called ‘Everest Link.’ Also, up to the Namche Bazar region, you have 4G network connectivity, provided by Nepal Telecom & Ncell. The ‘Everest Link’ is founded and operated by Nepali engineers solely for installing connectivity using solar panels and line-of-sight radio towers. This network is the only reason modern health wearables can function and transmit data, which has not only made mountaineering easy but has also saved thousands of lives.

So, what are these “health wearables”? In the context, it refers to the high-tech equipment that tracks your survival. It’s not like your everyday standard consumer devices, like smartwatches to track your daily steps or heart rate. Devices like a wrist pulse oximeter monitor conditions like Acute Mountain Sickness (AMS), which can develop further into deadly conditions like HAPE (leak of fluid in the lungs) and HACE (fluid in the brain). This device has an automated SOS triggering mechanism that automatically broadcasts emergency signals to the rescue team with exact GPS coordinates whenever there is a fatal drop in health conditions. Moreover, it can also share your live location and help to communicate with your family members who are miles away. They have algorithms (programs) set in a way that track the trend of the climber’s data over days. Suppose a climber’s lungs aren’t adjusting to the increasing altitude and aren’t recovering during sleep; the device alerts the climber to stop ascending before severe conditions like HAPE or HACE hit. Such equipment is, obviously, designed to resist the cold & harsh temperatures. The system can warn of the condition as high-risk chances up to 12 to 24 hours before the condition starts kicking in. So, the next time you see a watch-like object on a mountaineer’s wrist, remember it’s not any ordinary watch; well, it isn’t even just a watch.

Additionally, the researchers are also building “Smart Jackets” that can track a climber’s respiration rate and lung performance. They are tight-fitting medical vests embedded with sensors. Companies like Garmin (American), Suunto (Finnish), and Coros (American-Chinese) dominate the manufacture of the most popular device, the wrist pulse oximeter. Even though the device on the wrist of the climbers is not Nepali, the network that connects the device is Nepali, and the high-risk airway rescue is also managed by Nepali companies. The rescue helicopters are not the average ones; they defy the laws of aerodynamics, where normal helicopters can’t create a lift due to the thin air. The helicopter used here is an Airbus H125. Other engines fail to even start because of the insufficient oxygen required for fuel combustion. The pilots use incoming GPS coordinates and calculate exactly how much fuel is required. The blades are designed in a way that it grabs as much thin air as possible.

Since climbing for the average human has become a lot easier, what about the climbers with physical disabilities? For deaf & blind people, researcher Leon Lu at the University of Toronto Mississauga designed the Haptic Harness. It is a signal-sending vest that turns a guide’s hand signals into physical vibrations in the climber’s vest. This project is currently in an active testing phase. For amputees, there are ‘shorty’ legs made of carbon fiber that have thermal heating to prevent frostbite and maintain the temperature. The legs are a bit shorter than they should be to lower their center of gravity for better balance. For blind people, whose only means of knowing the upcoming shape and condition of the path is hearing, they use bone conduction headphones. Well, it might seem unusual, because they are blind, not deaf, but when climbing Everest, the high-speed wind is very deafening. Other climbers use signals to communicate. In this harsh condition, your normal audio phones don’t work. Bone conduction headphones change the voice into physical vibrations that vibrate on your cheekbone. These vibrations travel to your inner ear and change into sound for your brain to process, no matter how loud the blizzard outside is. This can also be used by non-adaptive athletes.

Technology has redefined the route to the pinnacle of the world for everyone. Despite the geographical brutality of Mount Everest, modern innovation has conquered it. Sagarmatha truly deserves all the innovations and inventions; human creativity for technological development should not be limited to a part of the world with no slope.