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Engineer Develops Sonar Alarm System To Monitor Kids In the Pool (newatlas.com)
British electrical engineer John Barstead created a sonar alarm system that will warn parents or nearby sunbathers if a small child has accidentally fallen into a pool. The Dolphin Alarm, as it is called, is currently raising production funds on Kickstarter. New Atlas explains how it works: When small children who have no business going into the pool on their own are out playing near it, they wear a special wristband. If they should fall in, the wristband will generate a three-tone sonar signal as soon as it's immersed in the water. That signal will be detected by a hydrophone contained within a receiver unit that floats in the pool. When that happens, the unit will emit a 131-decibel alarm. It will also transmit an alert to an indoor remote unit located up to 150 m away (170 ft), which will likewise sound an alarm of its own. While there are other child-in-the-pool alarms, most of them are wave-activated and have to be shut off when other people are using the pool.
The wristband is the flaw. A kid who isn't supposed to go into the pool isn't going to wear their special wristband, especially if it isn't their pool.
If the problem is unsupervised children falling into a pool, the solution is a fence.
After several minutes thought I find it rather hard to figure out the market for this product:
* It requires modification of the pool environment, but is inferior to wave based child detection systems because it also requires,
* Modification of the child via a large battery powered wrist strap, but is inferior to a leash because they can still fall in pools
It also looks suspiciously like vapourwear:
* no examples of it in operation
* all depictions of the prototype are actually renders
* any time the product is depicted "in use" it is a still photo with photoshop modifications
I would think a wave-activated device, coupled with a security camera and some sort of mobile or web app, would be great (if I had a pool, which I don’t). It would work for neighborhood kids, which this wouldn’t. And, if I were away from the house, I could still call for emergency responders were it warranted.
This new “invention” seems like something we could’ve had in the 1960s. The only reason it’s even here is probably the word “KickStarter”. Hey, @whipslash, please consider adding the ability to filter out KickStarter stories, the way we can other subjects.
#DeleteChrome
Shock Collars and invisible fencing should protect your children quite nicely. And provide a handy guide for your robotic mower, which totally would never kill people instead of cutting grass. /s
Anyone can get distracted for just a few minutes, no matter how doting the parents are. That's all it takes for tragedy to occur. Many years ago, my young cousin drowned in my aunt and uncle's pool. She simply wandered off and fell in. That's what toddlers do, after all. I'm sure they would have given anything for a device like this to warn them.
I hope this works. It's a simple idea that could potentially save some heartbreak like our family had to go through.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
Interesting idea, but pool guarding systems based only on video is pretty common. Like PoolView, SwimEye, AngelEye among others. It has existed for many years. As a matter of fact, my brother used to code for one of these systems. It's all underwater video monitoring with pattern detection and works fairly well.
The only scenario where I could see this sonar-version would be practical is in Hotel resorts or other closed areas where visiting kids are given this wristband and then left to roam the premises unattended. Going for private households might be the angle required for Kickstarter, but all in all this seems like a product more suited for the business market, IMHO.