You might have seen news a few weeks back about the rescue of a US pilot from Iran. Then came a media post from NewYorkPost about Ghost Murmur, a device that supposedly helped find him by detecting his heartbeat 60km away. There was a lot being said about it. I wanted to see if this was scientifically possible. It’s defense tech, so this will be slightly speculative from my end.
The claim made is that your heart creates a tiny magnetic field when current flows through it. A sensor picks it up and an “AI” software filters the noise and looks for a heartbeat pattern.
I deep-dived into it. There was a base technology that kind of enables it. It’s called Quantum Magnetometry. This was shown with NV centers in diamond. NV means nitrogen-vacancy. In simple terms, one carbon atom in diamond is replaced by nitrogen, and the neighbouring carbon atom is empty. When you shine laser light and apply microwaves, its quantum state changes slightly with the magnetic field around it. By reading that change in light, the diamond can act like a very sensitive magnetic-field probe.
So the probing tech is real. Many research groups work on NV-diamond magnetometry, and heart magnetic signals are also real. But heartbeat magnetic field is a very weak near-field signal. Near the chest, it may be in the picoTesla range, which is already tiny. A picoTesla is one trillionth of a Tesla. For reference, Earth’s magnetic field is usually around 25-65 microtesla.
And once you move away, that signal drops very fast. So I highly doubt they have somehow magically solved the problem that it survived kilometres of air, terrain and Earth’s magnetic field. They claim AI software, but AI can kick in only if the data capture is possible. So detecting one human heartbeat from 60 km away feels extremely unlikely based on public physics. I do think the claim is an overexaggeration from someone either to mislead or oversell.
Realistically it might be a sensor fusion. Maybe like a rescue beacon, GPS burst, thermal imaging and maybe some magnetic sensing all feeding one system.
What do you folks think?
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