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

[TedTschopp]

The article stated that the pool was busy and that she jumped in and never came up, she passed out as she was entering the water. No scream, no splashing or struggling, just girl jumps in and doesn't come up out of the water.

Re:One step further

[kfg]

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

Re:One step further

[Valleye]

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.

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

[Valiss]

Or the lifeguards can just pay attention? Isnt that what they are paid for?

I spent the first few years of college as a lifeguard for the city and county. Sure, a lifeguard pays attention, but when the city is short staffed due to the budget and there is 1 lifeguard for, say, every 45 kids at the pool, it's hard to watch them all at the same time.

Combine that with the fact that this is a job where you are paying just a couple bucks more an hour than min. wage to ensure you child does not die. And, like so many other services, parents just treat the city pool like a babysitter.

Honestly, I left because (despite what Baywatch will tell you) it's a reasonably high stress job, for such low pay.

I might look at one kid down in the pool among the 100+ other kids in my section to guard. Is that kid practicing floating? Is he playing dead with his friends? Should I blow my whistle and make a save? Maybe he's just trying new goggles underwater. Do I risk that? What if I'm wrong? Combine that with the fact that IF a child were to die, the parent would sue you and everyone above you all the way to the mayor.

These are the millions of things that go through your mind every few minutes when you are watching a pool. In the 2 years I was there, I only had to save 1 kid. And it was due to parent neglect: a mother let her infant walk into the shallow end of the pool. As soon as the kid tripped in the water, he was no longer able to regain his footing and was floating face down in the pool!) After the end of that season, I traded in my buoy for a keyboard.

So it's not always as clear as to "just look at the water."

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

[grammar fascist]

No scream, no splashing or struggling, just girl jumps in and doesn't come up out of the water.

Funny enough, that's usually what happens, since most people in distress either can't swim or have a medical problem that prevents them from doing so.

The non-swimmers are the most interesting. In lifeguard training, we watched a video of swimmers in distress taken at a water park. It turns out that something like 1/3 of the people who go there can't swim, and they still use the big slides that dump you into six feet of water! Lifeguards were making more than ten saves every day...so it was a perfect place to get video.

You'd be surprised how quiet they are. They're not bothered to scream or shout - they're mostly trying to breathe. They move very little, splash very little, kick straight down, do dumb, ineffective things with their arms.... The quiet, animalistic panic just before drowning is a little eerie to watch.

If someone is treading water and shouting "HELP!" he's probably fine, in other words. For the moment, anyway.

Any lifeguard worth his salt would be watching young people in the deep end, especially those underwater. The lifeguard on duty may have been doing that, in fact, and would have just waited longer than the Poseidon system did. The article doesn't say whether the lifeguard was tracking the girl already.

Re:One step further

[kfg]

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

Re:One step further

[E8086]

"1 lifeguard for, say, every 45 kids at the pool, it's hard to watch them all at the same time."

At least 50:1 of kids to lifeguards. I had the privlage of working at the city pool during a few highschool summers, as the cook in the refreshments stand, so I didn't have to be anywhere the water area. I never cared much for swimming and once you work there and see what ends up in the pool, you don't want to have to touch the water with a 10' pole. "Somebody made a floaty"
It was/is an olympic size pool or very close with 6 lifeguard stands around the pool with 2 on "safety patrol" walking around the pool grounds and the other 2 at the first aid station. Three times as week was day camp day, all the summer day camps in the city showed up, close to 2500 kids. The camp counselors were suposed to watch their groups when they weren't in the pool, but they never did. There were other non-lifeguard staff there so it ended up being about 200:1 of kids running around to staff. And while in the pool they like to play the who can hold their breath the longest making it even more difficult for keep an eye on everyone. The only advantage was the deeper water was blocked off and only had the 3' diving board and slide and only one person was allowed to use each at a time and there was a lifeguard at each 1:1 in the "deep end" so it would not have been possible for there to be an unsupervised kid in 12'6" of water.
Even for pools of mostly 4' water underwater cameras would improve underwater visability, try looking into a pool with mid-day summer sun glare in your face, even with sunglasses. But you'd have to have to hire someone to stare at the monitors all day, once there's a budget to buy the system.

Re:One step further

[jacksonj04]

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.

Re:One step further

[Overzeetop]

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.

Re:One step further

[sanosuke76]

Simple solution: start a rumor that womens' swimsuits frequently fall off on-camera. Problem solved, plenty of volunteers to watch the monitors tirelessly!

Re:One step further

[Skye16]

Considering what a bastard I was (am), I would have consistently gotten the watch wet just to irritate my parents who made me wear the stupid thing. I'm relatively sure that, barring any other source of water, I would have pissed on it (but only because I'm the sort of person who will piss on their arm just to not have to do something ELSE they wouldn't want to do).

As an offtopic aside - I spent a lot of time grounded as a child. : )

Re:One step further

[Elminst]

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.

Excellent.

[Trusty Penfold]

That's wonderful news.

But ... "It then compares images to a database of thousands of examples of swimmers in trouble. " ... seems like an inefficient and error prone way to solve this problem.

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.

Re:Excellent.

[chriss]

People drowning usually have something in common: once they lost their consciousness, they don't move that much. In contrast, people will stay afloat by making the weirdest movements, and it is not trivial to determine whether someone is making strange movements because a) they cannot swim or b) they try to splash water on everybody around.

So identifying somebody who does not move and is sinking to the bottom of the pool seems much easier and will only require several thousand images of other peoples in trouble. Correctly identifying swimmers doing just fine would be much more complicated due to the infinite ways to swim without drowning.

Re:Excellent.

[kfg]

Why is it harder to park a car than unpark one?

Because there is only one state in the entire universe that counts as being parked. To park a car you must achieve the restricted state.

To unpark a car you need only achieve any other state.

The number of states a person not in trouble can be in is large. The number of states a person in trouble can be in is far smaller.

KFG

Re:Excellent.

[typical]

But ... "It then compares images to a database of thousands of examples of swimmers in trouble. " ... seems like an inefficient and error prone way to solve this problem.

Ah hah! Your database doesn't have a single image of an octopus attacking a motorcycle rider after he accidentally drove his motorcycle into a pool, *does* it!

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!

£65,000?

[toofast]

Worth every cent.

Re: £65,000?

[Homology]

Worth every cent.

Erh, I guess that should be pennies :-)

Re: £65,000?

[RFC959]

I don't want to sound like an ogre - I'm glad she was saved - but can we really say this so uncritically? As the article points out, this is the first time anyone has been saved in the UK, and there are eight UK pools with the system; that makes the cost not £65,000 but 8 * 65000, or £520,000, plus whatever maintenance costs the system has. Let's not forget the difference between what is seen (girl saved by Poseidon system) versus what is not seen (whatever else could have been done with £520,000). It's possible that there might have been some better use for over half a million pounds. It's hard to argue against someone's life being saved, but that's because we can't see every alternative (two people's lives being saved by operations? many people's lives being improved?)

I also find it easy to imagine a day when there is a law that all pools, or at least all public pools, must have a system like this. But these systems are expensive, so some people might decide to build something else, not a pool. And if a child doesn't learn to swim because there isn't a local pool and ends up drowning somewhere else, would the connection ever be drawn? If a thousand children get less exercise because a pool isn't built, how do we account for that?

I'm not saying the system is a bad thing - I'm just saying we always need to think critically about possible tradeoffs.

Re: £65,000?

[mollymoo]

People dying in situations like this is extemely expensive. Ambulance, A&E, autopsy, inquest, council report... Even without factoring the girl's future contribution to GDP I think the system has proved itself pretty cost effective.

Mastercard

[LittleGuernica]

Mastercard will love this one. Poseidon: 65k. Saving a young life: priceless. For everything else...you get the drill

Another link with video...

[It doesn't come easy]

Another link with video and more details. As the father of a two-year-old daughter, watching the girl sink to the bottom of the pool, completely motionless for a minute or so, and then be rescued invoked more emotion in me than I would have believed possible. I would say this one incident more than justified the $118,000 price tag.

Re:Another link with video...

[temojen]

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.

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.

Re:Another link with video...

[ArtStone]

or even more to the point - why wouldn't the parents be that "personal lifeguard" who never lets their children out of their sight while they are at the pool, and would come to their rescue if they get in trouble?

65,000 pounds. So?

[SiMac]

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...

Re:65,000 pounds. So?

[subreality]

Keep in mind, this is 65,000 UKP *per pool*. So, over two years we've saved one life for UKP$ 65,000 * 75 pools (according to their web site).

Food for thought: Regardless of what you think a human life is worth, at some point, the money would be better spent somewhere else where you can save more than 0.5 lives per 2 years per US$ 9,000,000.

Clarification

[Poromenos1]

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?

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?

Re:How did she drown?

[Mia'cova]

Rescues can be dangerous. Alerting a weak swimmer near to someone fighting for their life would essentially result in two people drowning. The weak swimmer would approach the drowning victim, be grabbed, and pulled underwater as the drowning victim pulls/pushes themselves upwards for air. That's how I see a conscious scenario working out.

In a scenario like this one, pulling them up improperly would likely result in a lot of extra water in the lungs. This makes resuscitation significantly more difficult. A proper rescue would cover the mouth and nose and tilt the face downwards as they're raised to the surface.

If the victim was injured in a such a way that a spinal injury was incurred, having an untrained patron grabbing them could result in paralysation.

Untrained patrons may also find themselves ill-prepared to deal with other conditions such as seizures.

Not to mention the legal ramifications of this. If a patron was at all injured or traumatized by being in a situation where the facility placed a moral obligation for them to help on their shoulders, there's the potential for an ugly law-suit.

All in all, I think alerting the lifeguards to these alerts is adequate. There should always be lifeguards available to respond to an emergency. When there is limited staffing available to respond to emergencies, the pool is closed. That's standard. Bring public into a sketchy situation is something I would, as a lifeguard, be very hesitant to see.

Just keep in mind not everyone can swim. Not everyone lives near a beach. Not everyone is from a part of the world where swimming is particularly common. Many aquatic dangers are not obvious if you haven't grown up around water. Work in Vancouver for a few years and you'll get a pretty good idea of how swimming abilities range in various countries. I'm not bashing them. I'm just saying swimming abilities and water safety skills range greatly.

Poseidon Vista

[LittleGuernica]

In late 2006 they will Install Poseidon Vista, which makes the entire pool searchable, have an "aqua" interface and tranparant water. A new filtersing system is also planned, called PoseidonFS, but will probably come with service pack 1.

Re:Poseidon Vista

[WillAffleckUW]

In late 2006 they will Install Poseidon Vista, which makes the entire pool searchable, have an "aqua" interface and tranparant water. A new filtersing system is also planned, called PoseidonFS, but will probably come with service pack 1.

It will also have tabbed swimming, allowing multiple swimmers to use one pool lane at the same time, at different depths, and will come complete with extra features like clogged filters.

Joke

[lappy512]

This reminds me of a joke about a education school system:

This guy describes to the school administrator about a complex method of educating students, but it seems like a good idea to get students to learn.

But, the Administrator looked at the price tag, and asked, is it really worth it, to spend all this money for education?

And the guy replied: "If it was MY child, yes!"

This shows that some things, no matter the price tag, can be justified to save a life or the education system.

Re:Joke

[Vellmont]

This shows that some things, no matter the price tag, can be justified to save a life or the education system.


If your goal is really life saving, is it possible there's a better place that 65,000 pounds could go that would save more lives? The other question that I brought up in another post is if public pools even have anything like 65,000 pounds to spend on a system such as this.

I think people get too caught up in all the emotionalism of the immediate and visible life saving that this system offers. Something more boring like increased immunizations just isn't as exciting, though it might be a lot more effective per dollar.

Re:Lifeguards?

[Anonymous Coward]

TFA says that it's deeper than usual, due to the diving boards, and that there were a lot of surface swimmers which obscure what's happening that deep.

I wonder why it decided to save her

[kyle90]

After all, she only had an 11% chance of survival, but Will Smith had a 40% chance.

Re:Gotta love PR people

[neurosis101]

He might not be but I wouldn't be surprised if they had a doctor on the development team in order to supply information about what type of response times are acceptable. I'm sure many design decisions were made on the basis of a certain amount of time a person can be underwater. I mean what's the point of a system that can detect someone not moving after 10 minutes if they're going to die in three?

At least I would have had contact with an M.D. and made design decisions with his input.

Re:Cheaper alternative

[RatBastard]

why not just have one dedicated person [snip] watch the camera feed?

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...

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:Cost benefit

[GPez]

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.

Re:Cost benefit

[Michael Woodhams]

I don't get your point. Whatever we spend 6.5M pounds on (more lifeguards, overpriced military hardware, whatever), it doesn't disappear. If we don't spend it (lowering pool admission fees, or rates if it is a municipal pool), then it still doesn't disappear but gets spent on ice-creams, bigger mortgages etc.

Spending money is an allocation of limited resources (primarily labour) to a certain cause. If, for example we spend 65k pounds on an anti-drowning system and it is completely ineffective, then all the labour and resources that went into that system have indeed effectively disappeared. (Except that we now know what not to do again.)

I was comparing the cost/benefit to other systems - roading and airlines. In 1st world countries, safety upgrades are expected to save about one life per $1M (roughly). This system comes in at a similar (same order of magnitude) cost.

Re:Cost benefit

[bluekanoodle]

Except thaat assuming each lifeguard get paid $10 an hour. Now figure the pool is open 12 hours. 12 staff hours a day equals 120. Now adding in all the extra taxes and benefits it cost to support that employee we'll call it an round $150 dollars a day to add 1 more set of eyes.

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.

Good God!

[Black Parrot]

> by paging lifeguards when it could not detect her moving.

Let's hope they never deploy this where I work!

Kind of pointless

[EdwinBoyd]

I'm happy to hear that the girl was not hurt and I'll be the first to throw out the corny "if it saves one life then it's worth the cost" However, we're speaking about a pool here, it's not as if the lifeguard has an entire beach to scan. At best the device sent the page seconds before the guard on duty would notice and at worst it encourages the guards to perhaps not be as diligent as they should be. "Excuse me my son appears to be drowning" "No fear ma'am the Hasslehoff 3000 is on the job"

Re:KISS

[pclminion]

That's a FANTASTIC idea (no sarcasm), and if I believed in patents I would urge you to patent it ;-)

related images not in the article

[file cabinet]

http://images.thetimes.co.uk/TGD/picture/0,,224690 ,00.jpg
http://images.thetimes.co.uk/TGD/picture/0,,224691 ,00.jpg
http://images.thetimes.co.uk/TGD/picture/0,,224692 ,00.jpg
http://images.thetimes.co.uk/TGD/picture/0,,224693 ,00.jpg
http://images.thetimes.co.uk/TGD/picture/0,,224694 ,00.jpg
http://images.thetimes.co.uk/TGD/picture/0,,224695 ,00.jpg

Re:Gotta love PR people

[pclminion]

Does he think he's a doctor or what?

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.

In other news...

[mriya3]

"An automated swimmer tracking system installed in a pool in Wales allowed lifeguards to ban a man that was urinating in the pool"

Re:Wales Needs Vowels

[oberondarksoul]

Just a hint: might want to check your facts. We use miles in the UK... :P

Re:KISS

[SteveAyre]

Good idea, but I think it might be more of a risk though.

What if you tangled your foot in the netting? You might pull up and thus no longer be at the bottom of the pool setting the alarm off, but be stuck underwater and in a 12ft deep end no-one would be able to survive that sort of a manual rescue.

Having such a system would also make the budget constrained councils probably stop employing lifeguards thinking the system would replace them. However they're still needed, for manual rescues, in case the system fails, for first aid such as if someone slips while walking alongside the pool and hits their head.

There are too many pools already doing away with a lifeguard and instead relying on "parent supervision". An untrained parent whose attention is not guaranteed will never be as safe as a trained lifeguard.

It already paid itself back...

[Yaa 101]

People in Europe and the UK are worth about 1.000.000 Euro's, this is the smallest amount that this person will hand over as taxes to the country it lives in.

So apart from being great to save lifes, it is really an economical sound thing to do.

Price of a human life

[Teppy]

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!"

Download the video here:

[Some Random Username]

http://download.poseidon-tech.com/Bangor/Film/

Username and password are both user1.

15 cents per person is too much?

[Trillian_1138]

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).

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 /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.

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

I saw this years ago

[grahamsz]

I used to live in Kinross in scotland, and the pool there has a section with a moveable floor.

It uses some sort of hydraulic arrangement to vary the pool depth, so it can do anything from a diving pool to a 6in deep baby pool.

It may not be fast enough in this situation, but i see no reason why it couldn't just push the pool floor all the way up until the unconcious individual is out of the water.

Re:Wales Needs Vowels

[StonedRat]

The welsh alphabet is not the same as the english, in welsh W is a vowel.

How about

[melted]

How about just watching your freaking kids using the freaking pool? What if pool owner installs this $100K+ system and it fails to react to a drowning kid? What if no one is available to rescue the kid? What if the potential rescuer is also a poor swimmer?

There are thousands of "what ifs" here. The point is, watch after your kids until they're smart enough to watch after themselves (about 20-21 years or so). This is coming from a person who had a severe trauma at 1.5 years of age due to parents not watching.

Spending hundred thousand dollars is not a reason to be careless enough to let your kid (or friend) drown in the pool.

Re:KISS

[Taladar]

An untrained parent whose attention is not guaranteed will never be as safe as a trained lifeguard.

You are right. But neither of those two alone is enough. Both the parents and the lifeguard are responsible for watching the children. And the parents, not the lifeguard are to blame for drowned children. If they were not confident in their child's swimming skills they could have send it to courses or avoided going swimming completely. The lifeguard has neither of those choices.

Billiards

[NitsujTPU]

RTFA, the British don't call it pool, they call it Billiards!

Re:really?

[Blkdeath]

I'm guessing you are either in high school or college and don't realize just how long it really takes to make $120,000.

Firstly, those statistics are based on a spectrum that includes low to middle class countries and middle-class residents therein.

Secondly, in North America, the UK, Europe, etc. the amount of disposable income (money remaining after the necessities of life) is largely dependant on the things you choose to spend your money on. Even the cost of housing will dictate your disposable assets. Do you need that $1200/month appartment, or would $600/month be suitable to your needs? Do you live on your own, with a significant other, one or more roommates, family members, or friends? What kind of car do you drive? Cell phone, high speed Internet, cable/satellite television, etc. are all bills that add up to less disposable cash at the end of the month.

I personally know a millionaire who drives a 1988 Ford pickup. I'm surprised teh thing still runs. But based on his accepted style of living, more than 50% of his annual income is 'disposable' (and subsequently invested).

If you're able to contain your consumeristic instincts you can bank $120k (plus interest) in 4 years on a modest $60k/yr salary.

Re:Is drowning painful?

[KillerBob]

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.

Re:The system is a waste of money

[KillerBob]

The £65,000 cost of the Poseidon system would have been better spend hiring more and better trained lifeguards and keeping them well trained.

Shame on you. If you're really an experienced lifeguard, you would understand that the best lifeguard in the world can still make mistakes. All the training in the world won't give them a 100% guarantee of saving everybody who has an accident in the pool, and any system that improves the odds is a good investment. Whether better training could have saved the girl any better is something we can't know. What we do know, however, is that the girl wasn't noticed by the lifeguards, and that the system's alarm helped the lifeguards to react in time to save her life. 65k well spent.

And incidentally, I got my NLS back when it was still called the Royal Lifesaving Society of Canada (RLSSC).

Price is not worth it.

[raehl]

At $120,000 a pop, it's probably not worth it. What is the operational life of the system? How much does it cost to maintain? How many of the systems will actually save a life?

Like it or not, life DOES have a monetary value. If we only save one life per $10 million spent, that's probably not worth it (as we could save many more lives spending $10 million elsewhere.) The FAA values a life at about 2.3 million dollars - and only mandates changes where the cost of changes is less than 2.3 million dollars times lives expected to be saved.

The reality of life is that if we're all going to have MEANINGFUL lives, some of us are just going to have to die sometimes.

Re:the test

[takev]

Doesn't that take a lot of time if you have a lot of people showing up? I live in the Netherlands and swimming pools can be very busy, at some pools you pay for an hour of pool time, so there is a continues stream of people.

Now in the Netherlands (up to a few years ago) everyone got swimming lessons in junior high, so almost everyone can swim. I find it worrying that parents need to get swimming lessons for their kids now, they are quite expensive I've heard. We are in a country surrounded by water.

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.

Re:Is drowning painful?

[demonlapin]

This is, medically speaking, totally incorrect as to mechanism but correct on one essential point: when you inhale large amounts of water, go to a hospital.

Why? You breathed in either pond water (yuck) or chlorinated water from a pool. The chlorine in the pool water acts as a direct irritant to the tissues of the lung and causes the blood vessels to become more leaky than usual (just like the swelling around an infection). This causes the fluid to exit your vessels and fill your lungs, which causes you respiratory distress. The more proper term is chemical pneumonitis, and if you get in bad shape from it you may end up on a ventilator for a while.

Disclaimer: yes, I am a doctor, but just barely. The above is not medical advice for your specific situation but is instead general information designed to educate the public. Do whatever your doctor tells you to do.