At least I haven’t heard. It is a bit strange, as I don’t see this as a problem that is self-evidently impossible to solve. In fact it would be great to create a start up company to solve this problem (if I had money to hire people to help me, that is!). Who knows how many thousands of people die of drowning or at least become brain damaged every year. Preventing these incidents would make sense both morally and economically.
I am now talking about scenarios where people are aware someone has gone under the surface but they don’t know his exact location. Normal procedure is to call fire department divers to help, at least in these parts of the world.
I think the problem here is that drowning is a fairly fast process. So unless your system can be deployed within a very short time (2-3 minutes?), it’s not really going to be very useful. That implies that virtually everyone on the beach or at the lake is going to need to be equipped with one.
While I imagine your basic fish finder/depth finder technology could be adapted to the task, you’d still need some kind of floating platform to read the results and base your rescue from. So we’re basically talking retrieval here and not rescue.
GPS signals don’t work underwater. Now a system like this, designed for divers will send a location out. However it “Requires only small transmitter hung from boat or buoy” and has a “Range of up to one mile from transmitter.”
That means all you need to do is a) know that someone is already in distress rather than just swimming around, who b) is wearing that particular device and c) is within a mile of the transmitter while d) someone is actually monitoring the system.
Yeah, 2-3 mins might be enough for death or brain damage. In cold water people have survived significantly longer.
The problem you described is true - you need to be very fast or everywhere. However, introduction of commercial drones might solve this problem to a certain degree. Then it is only about an effective way to pinpoint where the victim is (and of course get someone to retrieve him).
What would such a system look like? People drowning don’t usually splash around making lots of noise, they just quietly slip below the surface. If you happen to see them go under, you know where to look, if not, you don’t typically realise anything is wrong. It’s hard to see how we could improve on a system of lifeguards trained to spot the warning signs. If you have an idea, don’t share it here. Get yourself down to the patent office.
No the problem is not solved then. You have to have a system in place to rescue people. With only about 4,000 drownings a year and it only taking a minutes to drown it is not economic to hire people to do this (except in the case of lifeguards in a few public swimming places).
Okay, so there are great devices already. But let’s assume someone forgets them at home and goes swimming anyway.
Life safer is adequate solution when he or she is present. But I guess not even them can always find a victim easily, because if the water is not really clear you need to dive almost 100% accurately to find them. And as PastTense said, they cost quite a lot. And so many people go to swim anyway in the places where there is no guarding whatsoever.
And it is true that there is not always people witnessing a drowning. But when there are, it might happen 100 yards away so it is very hard to find a victim.
That’s why it might be handy to have something that can be flown to the place with a drone and dropped to the water. I’m still trying to figure out what would be the most efficient way to locate sunken swimmers.
You need a system that does the following scenario:
Person disappears under water.
Some other person or machine notices this and sounds an alarm.
A drone (or whatever device) responds to the alarm by going to the general area (i.e. within a couple hundred feet) of the swimmer’s last surface position. How it knows where that is a mystery.
The device somehow locates the swimmer underwater.
The device somehow drags them to the surface, turns them face up, keeps them afloat and gets the water out of the lungs.
And no more than one or two *minutes *have to elapse for all 5 steps to be completed.
Probably 90% of beach or lake drownings fail between step 1 & 2.
If you’re supposing the device is only able to do steps 1 to 4 and people with boats, jetskis, swimmers, etc. are required to do step 5, you’ve already failed. There’s no way to get a crew there quickly enough in substantially all cases.
Lifeguards and such are useful for helping people on the surface who will sink in another few minutes if not rescued first. They’re not useful for recovering living people from underwater. They do recover dead bodies from there though.
Let’s say you really have 10 minutes to get a person from depths without him ending up as a total vegetable.
If a call to 911 and flight of the drone takes seven minutes, there is still some minutes left to locate him, get him to a shore and star to help him. The machine don’t have to drag him from depths. It is not unusual for person to be able to dive couple of meters and recover someone from a bottom if he just knows the exact place.
Sounds like we’d have to expend at least millions (if not billions) of dollars to save one life. Search and Rescue drones on standby near any/every body of water? Rescue divers ready to retrieve the victim from said sites? I don’t think so.
I’d rather spend the money to treat and cure more Hepatitis C, where the life-saving effects of the new interventions are proven. To name but one of many more easily prevented fatalities.
Around here (where there are a lot of rivers and lakes used for swimming, floating and boating) drownings tend to fall into a couple of key categories:
drunks, suicides and/or mentally ill people
children who were either unaccompanied or ran off for a few minutes
In the first instance you have people who aren’t going to wear any kind of rescue device. In the second instance, the kids are either pulled under by the current or in a cove or inlet within 500 feet of their parents and drowned so quickly even a lifeguard on site couldn’t get to them in time.
“In 1997, the National Safety Council placed the economic value of each unintentional
injury death at $790,000 and the comprehensive cost at $2,790,000 (National Safety
Council, 1997). Using the drowning figures from beaches in the USLA reporting system,
the comprehensive costs of drowning on coastlines in 1997 amounted to $273,420,000.” http://www.cdc.gov/HomeandRecreationalSafety/pubs/LifeguardReport-a.pdf
I don’t know if this includes cases where victim was left brain damaged.
Let us assume that a professional level drone with decent payload capacity costs 5000 dollars in the near future. Let us also assume the payload (whatever it is) costs another 5000 dollars. Of course the operational costs need to be added too but it seems that even with atrocious success rate these drones could easily pay pack their price. On the coast something like one drone per 7 miles would probably be sufficient.
You can hire Epirbs for a hike…
You can get a “help” alarm for people who may suffer a fit, turn, TIA, heart attack etc that will leave them unable to reach a phone to call for help…
At a local swimming pool, there are underwater cameras to show staff if someone has dropped to the bottom…
It would be nice to be able to give beach swimmers an alarm…
Worn around the neck, if they press the button (something like a hard to press “break here to trigger alarm” thing…) it alerts… But also, it could detect sitting under water for a while…
The rescue has to be quick, but if people are told about the person under water, they can be quick… eg nearby swimmers can be directed to dive to rescue the person… I can dive to 3 meters down.
Graphene and nano-tube spider-fibre rectal cord with a hydrogen/methane inflatable balloon encapsulating a micro-beacon triggering a Fulton surface-to-air recovery. Problem solved.
A collateral benefit is that silent but deadly public miscreants would be quickly whisked away.
People wear them, with full knowledge they send a signal to commence rescue procedure (and generating a bill if person found to be intentionally misusing!) if at X depth for X time, but have the option to take it off, leave it floating if planning to intentionally submerge for an extended period. If the light\laser beam could be visible and recognisable above water to other swimmers, that would be even better…
It would be nice if people would do things before they go to swim and drown. I’m not sure how realistic wish that is though, that’s why I’d like to think about aftermath.
Now that I think, there is no need to think about the price of drones. I bet in not so distant future, every fire department have at least one, for various purposes.
Easiest way they could be used in drowning cases would be dropping swimming goggles and self-inflating floats to people on shore to assist them. It would be probably also very easy and cheap to fit a drone with a wire that has a camera in the end of it to relay underwater image to controller somewhere. This would need clear water and good lighting conditions to be effective.
I believe you could achieve this in most basic form by lowering to water a normal watertight Android phone with little floats. Adding an external antenna would be a great benefit though. And probably some fins to keep it more stable.
But let’s assume someone forgets them at home and goes swimming anyway.