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.

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.

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.