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Automated Pool System Saves Swimmer
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Wed Aug 31, 2005 05:26 PM
from the watchful-eyes-for-something-besides-privacy-invasion dept.
from the watchful-eyes-for-something-besides-privacy-invasion dept.
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.
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One step further (Score:5, Interesting)
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 (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:One step further (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Parent
Re:One step further (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Parent
Re:One step further (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Re:One step further (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:One step further (Score:5, Insightful)
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
Parent
Re:One step further (Score:5, Insightful)
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
Parent
Re:One step further (Score:4, Funny)
As an offtopic aside - I spent a lot of time grounded as a child. : )
Parent
Re:One step further (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Re:One step further (Score:5, Informative)
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."
Parent
Re:One step further (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:One step further (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Re:One step further (Score:3, Interesting)
I like this tech and am glad somebody thought of it.
Re:KISS (Score:3, Funny)
Re:KISS (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Excellent. (Score:4, Insightful)
That's wonderful news.
But
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. (Score:3, Insightful)
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 t
Re:Excellent. (Score:5, Insightful)
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
Parent
£65,000? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: £65,000? (Score:4, Funny)
Erh, I guess that should be pennies :-)
Parent
Re: £65,000? (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Mastercard (Score:3, Funny)
Another link with video... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Another link with video... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Re:Another link with video... (Score:3, Interesting)
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 pri
Download the video here: (Score:5, Informative)
Username and password are both user1.
Parent
65,000 pounds. So? (Score:4, Insightful)
Seriously, 65,000 pounds for a life ain't bad. Look at the Vioxx lawsuit...
Re:65,000 pounds. So? (Score:3, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
Does this mean that the others weren't saved, or that that noone else came close to drowning?
Poseidon Vista (Score:5, Funny)
I wonder why it decided to save her (Score:5, Funny)
Cost benefit (Score:5, Interesting)
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 (Score:3, Insightful)
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 (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Good God! (Score:5, Funny)
> by paging lifeguards when it could not detect her moving.
Let's hope they never deploy this where I work!
related images not in the article (Score:3, Informative)
http://images.thetimes.co.uk/TGD/picture/0,,22469
http://images.thetimes.co.uk/TGD/picture/0,,22469
http://images.thetimes.co.uk/TGD/picture/0,,22469
http://images.thetimes.co.uk/TGD/picture/0,,22469
http://images.thetimes.co.uk/TGD/picture/0,,22469
In other news... (Score:4, Funny)
It already paid itself back... (Score:3, Insightful)
So apart from being great to save lifes, it is really an economical sound thing to do.
Price of a human life (Score:5, Insightful)
I did some calculations. There are 7.6 million residential pools in the US [aaisonline.com], and 832 drownings per year among children age 0-14 [cdc.gov]. 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 [cia.gov]. 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!"
15 cents per person is too much? (Score:5, Insightful)
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
Parent
Billiards (Score:4, Funny)
I've worked witn Poseidon (Score:5, Interesting)
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:Lifeguards? (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re:Cheaper alternative (Score:5, Insightful)
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...
Parent
Re:Gotta love PR people (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Re:Wales Needs Vowels (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Joke (Score:3, Insightful)
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. Som
Re:Is drowning painful? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Re:How did she drown? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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