WiCis-Sports

21 Steps to Follow when Choosing an Expedition Company for Everest or other 8000m Peaks The Fall season is upon us and it is the time when many plan their next big climb in the Himalayas. As I write this article, few major expeditions will be going to Nepal this year and it is still uncertain as to what next year will be like. But if you are optimistic about a turn-around with the pandemic, what follows are 21 key features that you should be looking at, in order to choose which expedition you will join next Spring for Everest North or Everest South. They are not in order of importance.  Success rate: Be wary of ANY company that claims 100% success rate. I have no knowledge of a single company that has this. Success means you arrive at BC, you participate in the expedition, you summit, and you return to BC. Don’t shop for phony success rates and instead look for a credible safety record. Safety also means no frostbite, no permanent organ damage, no time in a KTM ICU, no cardiac ste...

While we have tested extensively our system in the Sierra Nevada  (Western United States), we have yet to take it to the Himalayas. We will begin streaming from Jomsom, Nepal on March 19th. Jomsom is at 9,000 feet, and is the entry point to many climbs in the Himalayas. From Jomsom, one can see the Dhaulagiri and Nilgiri peaks. You will be able to follow the participants' heart rate, ECG, respiratory rate and waveform, temperature, and intermittent pulse oximetry, along with geo-location, speed, altitude, and bearing, all live! That is, that from anywhere in the world with an internet connected device, you will lag only about 1 second behind real time. There are three links to follow. Adventurer 1 Adventurer 2 Adventurer 3 We will be tweeting as to whenever these are live. We plan to send live data some 4-6 hours per day, some while climbing, some at camp. Expect much new data for high altitude physiology enthusiasts! There is little data on live ECG at altitude f...

A climber at 24,000 feet faces many challenges and for most of these he/she is completely unaware of their risks or of their possible outcome. In order to decrease these risks, one can monitor certain vital signs that will help us make better decisions up there. We have to decide what vital signs are useful to us, we have to be able to read them, and in real time, send them down to base camp or elsewhere in the world where somebody who is trained and is not hypoxic, can help us with the right decisions. Aviation has faced a similar dilemma, and the cockpit on the plane that flew you to Kathmandu or Lhasa has many instruments that have evolved over time to make aviation safer. Before your pilot takes off, he also has a weather briefing that is updated while in flight, to keep him informed of the big picture. The situation on the mountain is no different. Until recently, we were climbing with poor weather forecasts, and even today, a climber has few instruments to tell him of his r...

I have been around mountains for most of life, sometimes climbing them, sometimes trekking them, mostly flying off them, and I have always held them in deep respect. My 10 year old on his way to Job's peak near Lake Tahoe for his first 10,000 footer But as a medical doctor, I have always felt amazed as to how fragile our body is when we confront the elements. I am reminded of Nietzche's line that God must have felt so sorry when he had finished creating man, that he gave him a mind to make up for his scrawny appearance. So it is with our mind that we have been able to climb the highest summits. And it is with this mind that we have created solutions at WiCis-Sports that allow us to better know how our body is behaving at altitude and then sharing that data with those who can interpret it. Today, while you climb, we can monitor your body temperature, your heart rate, your oxygen saturation, and stream these numbers every second to a server where onl...