On a snow-covered field on Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson or JBER, the military base in Anchorage, Army Major Titus Rund climbed into an inflatable, covered sled. It looked kind of like the combination of an inflatable raft and a tent, with a clear plastic window that zips onto the top.
“Basically, on the worst day of my life, I can sit up,” Rund said. “I can be situationally aware.”
Rund, the inventor, has been working for more than two years on the design. A medical resident working with him, Dr. Trevor Scott, strapped the sled to his waist and ran a few laps on the field with Rund in the sled trailing behind across the snow.
“It’s like the belt system of a backpack basically–got a little harness,” Scott said.
It’s designed to produce very little friction so a smaller person can move a larger person to safety without tiring, Rund said. He said a major point of this system is to keep injured service members warm.
“If you become hypothermic, your chance of dying goes up,” Rund said.
Rund said he’d long advocated for better ways to manage hypothermia when an injured service member is evacuated, because it’s such a big factor in survival. His inspiration for this system came from knowing people died, even during desert warfare, when their core temperatures dropped. He thought, ‘If we can’t do it right in the desert, how are we going to do it in the cold and snow?’
He was also influenced by a Department of Defense assessment that identified challenges to providing medical care in extreme cold.
“What it distilled down to was, if we had a bubble of warmth and we could keep key medical supplies, not all medical supplies but key medical supplies, from freezing, then we could do medical care the way we've been doing it in Afghanistan and Iraq and Africa for the last 20 years,” Rund said.
So, the sled is designed to dock into a larger heated shelter where a medic can treat the person.
There’s a lot working against people who get injured outside in the cold. Besides the temperature, it may be wet. Safety and treatment are often a long way away. Rescue gear and supplies need to pack up small for transport and the system needs to be fast, to get the patient to treatment quickly. Rund says it’s important in combat to get everyone away from the site of injury within a few minutes to prevent further casualties.
Rund wanted to address all those design challenges with his CASEVAC Arctic rescue system, and he said it will be useful for civilian rescue too. The goal is to eventually allow it to be used far beyond the military. Rund’s design keeps people insulated from the wet and cold, keeps their torso elevated, and has its own heating element. It’s also light and easy to move without much friction. The sled slides flat under an injured person, and he said it inflates and is ready to move within ten to thirty seconds.
“It was about how quickly can we move a casualty and get them out of the environment?” Rund said.
Rund is a flight surgeon and has been developing the system with military funding. The United States has fought most of its recent wars in warm environments, but Rund said he thinks the war in Ukraine brought attention to the challenges of conflict in colder environments.
“As a standing military who has to provide deterrence, and the capability to do whatever our nation calls us to do, cold is definitely a part of that, whether that's defending the homeland or going wherever we're called to partner with our allies to prosecute the mission that we are sent to do,” Rund said.
Rund has tested three generations of designs of his rescue system. Medics tested the system during a Special Operations exercise in Fairbanks in February, and Rund has gotten feedback on the design from military and civilian experts, like Emily Johnston.
She’s a physician based in Washington who teaches cold-weather medical operations and rescue courses for the military. She said Rund’s sled will level up cold-weather rescue teams, whether that’s on a battlefield in Siberia or a glacier in Alaska.
“No question about it,” Johnston said. “It is leaps and bounds ahead of most of the rescue sleds that we use right now.”
Johnston has suggested improvements for Rund’s technology as he’s developed it. She said current rescue best practices are to bundle someone in blankets and a tarp and strap them into a rigid plastic sled.
“The cold transfers through the sled, so that's an added thermal problem that you're fighting,” Johnston said about the current technology. “In this case, the actual evacuation sled insulates the patient and that's a huge addition. It will help significantly in long evacs, particularly because it's just so hard to keep the patient warm in those situations.”
She said even in warmer environments people with traumatic injuries can get hypothermia and it worsens their chance of survival.
Johnston said because the technology is light and packs small, it could also work well for side-country or backcountry ski rescue, when it eventually is released beyond the military.
“This would be great, because you don't have toboggans staged in areas like that,” Johnston said. “There's just too much terrain. So the ability to carry this in and then self inflate it will be huge for backcountry rescues, for mountain rescue as well.”
Rund has filed for a patent for the system, and he says the military and its allies may be able to start ordering the technology as soon as next year.
