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.

Comments

One step further

[fembots]

Paging lifeguards is good as long as one is available.

Maybe in the future, a secondary (upper) tiles can be installed on the pool floor, and the system is able to pinpoint the victim and automatically raise enough tiles to push the victim out of the water.

Re:One step further

[Back Slider 1969]

It might be more practical to require children under a certain age (and disabled people) to wear a special life preserver that lays flat but can be remotely inflated (CO2 cartridges) by the system. And possibly release bright colored dyes into the surrounding water to give the lifeguards the exact location of the child quickly.
I like this tech and am glad somebody thought of it.

Re:One step further

[Detritus]

I was involved in a similar situation when I was a kid. A teenage girl, who was a poor swimmer, somehow swallowed some water and lost consciousness after diving in to the deep end of the pool. When I saw her, she was just suspended above the bottom, neutrally buoyant. The only reason I could see her was that I was swimming in the same area. She really wasn't visible from where the lifeguard was stationed, which was supposed to give the lifeguard a view of the entire pool. I ran and told the lifeguard, who immediately dove in and pulled her out. She quickly responded to mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and was OK. I don't blame the lifeguard. Due to the way the pool was designed and where the elevated lifeguard chair was located, the girl was difficult to see.

Re:One step further

[Overzeetop]

We played games like this when I was a little kid. You know, jump in and pretend you're dead, sinking slowly to the bottom, then lying there until you have to come up for air. With this system, it would gie a false positive. Lifeguards are tuned to see progressive problems, and to filter out as much play as possible. This girl might have been pulled out by the guard anyway, or it could have taken an extra 30 seconds to a couple of minutes to register that she wasn't just playing.

4 people is pretty slow, so shes more likely to have been pulled out "in time" without the system. I think the marketing pimp was a bit sensational with his "one more minute" claim, but if it bought this girl 30 seconds, it was probably worth it.

I didn't see any mention of the "miss" rate on this system.

Re:One step further

[fgl]

How about a cheap "Bio-monitor" that everyone has to wear. Or accept the liability of not wearing should they decide life sign monitoring is too obtrusive.

My guess is that extreme heart rate changes, or breathing changes would be far simpler to monitor & trigger alarms with. Relying on computers to detect "drowning" states seems a bit halfassed still.

Maybe in 5-10 years.

One could even make them in floater devices for the kiddies. I'd say something about 2 birds, one stone if it weren't so grim for the topic.

Re:One step further

[Anonymous Coward]

As a former lifeguard, I think this system is overrated.

I had a situation where I was guarding a crowded outdoor pool one summer. Kids were goofing around on a big floating island toy. A lot of them were swimming under it and coming up the other side, normal kid stuff.

I saw one kid slide off it and go under. I just kept watching but you sort of keep a mental count in your head. I know how long I can hold my breath, so I give a kid who's exerting himself a fraction of that time.

My first instinct is to jump in and yank him out. Then training kicks in and I remember this is a crowded pool (dangerous). So I grabbed a hook and reached him with it and pulled him up. He was coughing a bit, which told me he did need help, but it was also relieving knowing I was there in time.

The situation in this pool was probably similar. I doubt the paging system added much time to the guard's reaction unless the guards were truly goofing around or not doing their jobs. It is also possible a guard was already moving to get a tool or other aid to make a save without entering the pool himself, when the page occurred.

Re:Blydu Tydu!

[fatgav]

Off Topic? Gogs are the welsh name for people from North Wales. Blydu Tydu is faux Welsh spelling for Bloody Tidy, a welsh saying!

How did she drown?

[Odin_Tiger]

"She just jumped into the water and drifted down to the bottom, as if she was going to sleep." That sounds extremely bizarre to me. How does a person just lose consciousness like that? Shock from cold water, maybe?

Cost benefit

[Michael Woodhams]

Back-of-the-envelope:

100 systems installed, 65k pounds per system = 6.5M pounds.
Five lives saved (according to the article) = 1.3M pounds per life.

+: The systems are only recently installed, and have years of use yet, so should save many more. If they are 20% through their life-cycle, we can expect final cost around 260k pounds/life.
+?: Perhaps the system will allow cost savings through fewer lifeguards.
-: We're not 100% sure those people wouldn't have been saved anyway without the system.
-: I haven't accounted for running costs, just purchase cost.

It is at least in the ball-park of cost-per-life-saved for other safety expenditure such as on airlines and roads - and it will get cheaper. So we can expect these to become wide-spread in the next decade.

Re:Another link with video...

[Overzeetop]

The video is a bit surreal. After the fact (having a three year old daughter myself), $118k is a small fraction of what it would be worth. Every penny I've ever made, and every penny I'll make for the rest of my life is a bit closer, but probably still on the low side.

For pool management, though, you have to decide what your risk tolerance is. It's a dollars game for them. Kind of sick, really. But practical. No neighborhood pool, or one with only human lifeguards.

Personally, it would be nice to see the price come down a bit (maybe 75% or so). I was a lifeguard for several years in my teens/early 20s.
Even as a teen I would have had a hard time dealing with having someone drown on my watch. I would have like this system. It's a good backup for times when you can't see everything, or your attention is drawn away by running/horseplay/other problem bathers (no, I don't mean the girls who haven't learned that white bathing suits look cool, but are see through when they get into the water).

I have pulled a kid out of the water, once. I watched him tread water for 20-30 seconds in the diving well, lower and lower, until his body jerked a bit (gasp of air) and his head went under water. He was a decent swimmer for a 5-6 year old, but was too tired. I jumped in and pulled him out - he was fine after he coughed out a mouthful of water. Know what his parents did? Yelled at me for pulling him out. They said he was doing fine and was just swimming to the side. Yeah, right. Another guard who was walking the deck saw me go in and agreed that he wasn't about to swim anywhere. The parents didn't bother me - I knew I was lucky that I happend to be watching him. He'd been there all day, and you learn to keep an eye on certain bathers more carefully.

I've worked witn Poseidon

[HuguesT]

This is the 4th person being saved by the system. So far the system hasn't missed anybody drowning. There is about 1-4 false positive per day per pool (which is acceptable according to lifeguards).

The system is very quick, reacts in about 10s. It essentially works by finding and tracking everybody underwater in the pools. It knows the 3D location of all swimmers, and reacts if someone is underwater and motionless for a few seconds. Poseidon/VisionIQ did a lot of innovative research in 3D tracking which has been published and patented over the last 10 years or so. Some of the people working at that company are among the smartest I know.

Poseidon is a small company and as it is they barely break even. The system is not just clever software, but lots of cameras and a fast computer system. The installation is not easy as all cameras have to be calibrated for the specific 3D architecture of the pool. The cost may look steep but really is isn't that much compared with the normal cost of the pool maintenance, as it is essentially a one-off cost.

At a large public pool apparently someone can be expected to drown every other year or so in spite of lifeguards presence. Poseidon can make a difference. It cannot replace lifeguards as someone trained has to do the rescues, it is just an alert system.

In 2004 in the UK a person drowned in a pool which had rejected the Poseidon system. The next day the paper's outline were "Person drowns for want of 65,000 Pounds".

For all the Linux afficionados out there, last I heard Poseidon ran on Windows NT 4.0.

For all the naysayers out there, when Poseidon started no one thought they had a business, but they single-handedly created their own market. We can now expect competitors to show up. As most trailblazers Poseidon might be bought out in the future by some big security company spinoff or something. We can also expect the system's cost to come down somewhat in the future, and hopefully to be more prevalent.

Nevertheless I'd be very proud to have been associated with a small outfit who has measurably saved people's lives. Very few endeavours succeed in that regard.

Best.