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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.
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.
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
Worth every cent.
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.
The NSA: The only part of the US government that actually listens.
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?
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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.
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.
After all, she only had an 11% chance of survival, but Will Smith had a 40% chance.
Real_men_don't_need_spacebars.
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.
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.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
> by paging lifeguards when it could not detect her moving.
Let's hope they never deploy this where I work!
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
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
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.
"An automated swimmer tracking system installed in a pool in Wales allowed lifeguards to ban a man that was urinating in the pool"
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!"
http://download.poseidon-tech.com/Bangor/Film/
Username and password are both user1.
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
Linux is not Windows
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
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.
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.