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Automated Pool System Saves Swimmer
An anonymous reader writes "An automated swimmer tracking system installed in a pool in Wales has saved a young girl who just collapsed and sank to the bottom, by paging lifeguards when it could not detect her moving." This is the first time a UK swimmer has been saved by the £65,000 Poseidon system since it was installed in March of 2003.
That's wonderful news.
But
Obviously it worked in this case, but I would have thought the opposite approach would be safer - ie. compare images to picures of swimmers not in trouble and alert if there is no match.
With this existing system, if you drown in a way the system doesn't know about then you drown.
With the opposite system, if you swim in a way the system doesn't know about then the lifeguard gets a page, he has a quick check and presses the 'swimmer is okay' override button.
And why is image comparision even needed in this case? If an object of person size is on the bottom and not moving for more than X seconds (where X is some small number) then something is wrong.
Worth every cent.
The editorial comment makes it sound like the 65,000 pounds was a waste of money, but I'm sure that, had the child died, the parents would have parted with that much to have her back.
Seriously, 65,000 pounds for a life ain't bad. Look at the Vioxx lawsuit...
This is the first time a UK swimmer has been saved by the £65,000 Poseidon system since it was installed in March of 2003.
Does this mean that the others weren't saved, or that that noone else came close to drowning?
Send email from the afterlife! Write your e-will at Dead Man's Switch.
Boredom. You get bored. look at something else, sneeze, go to the restroom, etc... and you miss the whole thing. Computers don't get bored, thirsty, tired, hungry, etc...
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
If you pay a lifeguard twice as much that does not confer on them the ability to pay attention to twice as much for twice as long.
You will find, if you try it out, that it is actually quite difficult to pay attention to a single, nonmoving, object for any long period of time. Giving equal attention to merely two moving objects is impossible.
People in hazardous jobs routinely lose their own lives simply because they are not capable of applying enough attention to save themselves.
Electronic sensors have their limitations as well, but tireless watching is not one of them.
KFG
If you RTFA you would also have read that the water is too deep the glare makes it difficult to see the bottom. Couple that with a silent drowning and you can see why a life guard can miss this.
Instead of losing the diving boards and shallowing the pool which takes lots of fun out of pools. They invested in the system. It seems to work well in my estimation.
The Price is about to go up...
As every public pool administrator in Europe and North America realize they could get sued if they don't have the system and someone drowns.
You're forgetting some basic economics: 6.5M pounds doesn't just disappear. It goes to paying the workers who installed the system, the engineers who designed the system, the truck drivers that delivered the system, the factory workers who made the cameras, etc.
Its not just that the 6.5M pounds went down the tube. It would make more sense to look at this system's cost/benefit in relation to *other* similar systems, not just by itself.
You don't have to be a doctor to know facts (such as, brain damage starts to occurs 4 to 6 minutes after removal of oxygen).
What if the guy had said, "If that car had hit her head on, she surely would have broken some bones?" I guess he's not qualified to make that statement, either?
Doctors distinguish themselves by diagnosing illness and then working to cure it. That doesn't mean the rest of us are blithering idiots.
I know that there will soon be people chomping at the bit to mandate these things.
I did some calculations. There are 7.6 million residential pools in the US, and 832 drownings per year among children age 0-14. This number includes non-pool drownings, so the cost to save each child is actually higher than below. There are also a smaller number of adult deaths. Assuming a pool lasts for 20 years:
Cost per pool per year:
$100,000/20 = $5,000.
Cost per year, nationwide:
$5,000 * 7.6M = $38B
Cost per life saved:
$38B / 832 = $45.6M
The per capita Gross Domestic Product of the US is $40,100. At this rate, one person must work 1,140 years to save someone else's life. I realize that it's very chic to say you can't put a price on life, but if you don't, the entire population of the world will quickly be working full-time to do nothing but save lives.
It's a shame that logic always loses out to "Please, won't someone think about the children!"
You haven't done a lot of heart reate monitoring, have you? A person behaving normally around pool might have a heart rate of 50 bpm for an hour at a stretch, or go from 70 to 200 and back to 70 in a matter of minutes, or . . .
Heart rate varies radically. The only heart rate of interest that a safty monitor if this sort can convey is an arhythmia or no heart rate at all. Ideally you want to know about potential trouble long before that.
Relying on computers to detect "drowning" states seems a bit halfassed still.
This is why the system still relies on human observation and judgement.It does not replace the lifeguard. It is a tool of the lifeguard.
KFG
You didn't take the math to its completion. Sure, if each of the 832 people has to pay for their own rescue, it's $45.6M per person (going by your math, which I have no reason to doubt).
/295M in the USA (according to Google) is about 16 cents per person per year. I'd say 16 cents is a bargain for a life-saving technology.
But one of the great things about living in a country is that you get to pool (no pun intended) the resources of everyone who lives there. So $45.6M
I think I understand your objection, in that if we buy every new technology we *may* end up paying "too much" and spend all of our money on mechanisms which are only going to save one or two people. But at what point is "too much" to save a life?
I completely agree in that, at some point, a line needs to be drawn. But it's ridiculous to say that "one person must work 1,140 years to save someone else's life" because that's not how our country works (or any, as far as I know). I'm not going to need to work for a thousand years for fire protection or the police department or public education for that matter because those are things that, as a society, we've decided get used enough to pool our resources to buy as a city/county/state/country.
A better argument might be "For $38 billion we could do XXX and save more lives." That I could get behind. I was even with your math for the first two calculations, as I expected you to simply say "for $38B we could save a million people from dying of AIDs" or some other life-saving expenditure. But talking about a 'per-person' cost of something that wouldn't be billed 'per person' seems unrealistic.
-Trillian
Look at the photo. You see the deep end, the longest wall visible is the deep end wall. The slope visible on the left is the beginning of the slope to the shallow end, meaning there is most of the pool out of shot.
How many people can read hex if only you and dead people can read hex?
The miss rate matters. It matters because you'll never get a duplicated hit rate - one where both the system and the lifeguard recognized the problem in-time/simultaneously (i.e. - the system wan't needed). The false hit rate also matters, as lifeguards are human, and will fall prey to the cry wolf syndrome over time if the false positive rate is too high.
I do think the system is worth it. I also think it's been overrated by its marketers, and will continue to believe so until I see more complete data.
Yes, I was a lifeguard, and a lifeguard instructor, back when I was younger. I would have liked to have this system. Now that I'm older and, presumably, wiser I would like it twice as much. Why? Two sets of eyes are better than one, even if one set is digital. I would never fogive myself if I lost a child at a pool simply because I didn't happen to notice one of them slip under the surface and get lost in the commotion of a really busy summer pool day.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Linux is not Windows
Spoken by someone who obviously never lifeguarded.
Lifeguards are underpaid, undervalued, and generally overworked.
WE are treated like cheap babysitters. When I guarded we had parents drop their kids off at 9 am at the pool.. and leave them there until 9 PM. Didn't matter that public swim was only 1-5 and 630-9. And they would do this everyday.
And as other people have already posted; baywatch is full of shit. The vast majority of drownings occur just as this one did- SILENT.
There is no splashing, no screaming, no struggling. Because the person drowning has one sole purposel; get air.
Ever get the wind knocked out of you? do you run around the yard yelling for oxygen? NO.
You curl up in a ball. maybe one or two small arm movements, as you concentrate on one thing; BREATHING.
In 10 years of lifeguarding, I was LUCKY enough to have to only pull one little girl out of a lake when she caught a wave in the face. No screams, no splashing. Just silence and eyes like saucers.
Anything that that can shave even 30 secs off an emergency situation is a good thing.
No unauthorized use. Trespassers will be shot. Survivors will be shot again.
I'm saying this as a lifeguard, not as somebody who's ever drowned....
:)
The part while you're conscious is terrifying. If you lose conscious, you suffocate. I've had vascular chokes applied at Jiu Jitsu, and I imagine that drowning, when unconscious, is much the same... you start to grey out, you get weak, then you get numb, and finally, everything goes limp and you black out. If it's done right, you're out in under 20 seconds, and probably won't remember anything that just happened. Likewise, I think that drowning, once you go unconscious, is a pretty peaceful way to go, and you probably won't have much memory of the conscious part if you're rescued and revived. You could very easily have hallucinations or dreams while you're suffocating, depending on how far gone you are. Children tend to have lower oxygen carrying capacity than adults, because of a lesser volume of blood, and as a result they usually go unconscious faster. They are also a lot easier to revive
However... the part before you fall unconscious is pretty darned frightening. You run on complete adrenaline, and are a lot stronger than you would normally be. People who think they're drowning, and realize what that means, will grab on to anything that floats, including rescuers, but they'll usually relax, and sometimes pass out as soon as they realize that they're safe. Sometimes, however, it's safer for the rescuer to wait until the victim goes unconscious before rescuing them, particularly when you aren't part of a team, and don't have people to help you.
The real risk with drowning cases, and the reason I suggest that anybody who drowns goes to the hospital irregardless of how they feel after revival is secondary drowning. Often what happens, when your lungs fill with water, is that the water will be absorbed into the blood stream. Later, when you're asleep, the blood can reenter the lungs and because your pulse is lower and your breathing is both slower and shallower, you can suffocate hours after the accident actually happened. If you've had an accident in the water and there's *any* chance that water entered your lungs, you should go to the hospital for observation overnight.
If you believe everything you read, you'd better not read. - Japanese proverb
From what I can get, this was in an indoor pool. That means it's probably open all year. Let's just assume counting holidays and other events, for the sake of this argument, the pool is open 300 days a year. That means to add one more employee it costs the pool operators $45000 a year.
This system pays for itself in little over 2 years, without the problems of boredom, inattention etc, plus no problems with employee turnaround or management. Sounds like adding even 1 lifeguard would be more expensive many times over over the lifetime of this system.