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

[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

[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

[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.

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.

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: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

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