Apple wants the Apple Watch to be able to detect when you’re downing — and call for help. The company has been granted a patent for a “Wearable Device Used as a Digital Pool Attendant.”
About the patent
The patent relates generally to pool alarm systems and methods for detecting when swimmers are in distress or drowning.
Every year more than 3,500 people in the United States die from drowning. Drowning is also the fifth most common cause of accidental death in the country and most people who die by drowning are children. The average person can hold breath for about 30 seconds. For children, the length is shorter. A person who is in excellent health and has training for underwater emergencies can still only hold their breath for about 2 minutes. If a person is submerged 4-6 minutes in water without resuscitation, brain damage and eventually death by drowning will occur.
To prevent drowning accidents, drowning prevention systems have been developed that use camera surveillance systems to detect when a swimmer is in distress. For example, SwimEye™ uses a live video stream from underwater cameras to automatically monitor for swimmers in distress using object recognition software. When SwimEye detects a swimmer in distress on the bottom of the pool, it raises a radio alarm to pool lifeguards and a visual alarm to a monitoring and control station.
Apple notes that such a system, however, can be expensive as it requires the installation and maintenance of the underwater cameras and monitoring and control station, making such a solution more suitable for large public pools operated by a city or business (e.g., hotels). Also, swimmers can block the underwater cameras in highly populated public pools, and larger swimmers (e.g., adults) can obscure smaller swimmers (e.g., children), causing the object detection software to detect frequent false positives or experience missed detections, and other problems associated with object detection systems when there are many moving objects to detect and track.
Apple says that what’s needed is a more simple and cost-effective solution to drowning prevention systems that can be deployed in every type of freshwater pool, including public and private swimming pools and also natural pools (e.g., lakes, ponds, etc.) where underwater cameras would be impractical to install.
Apple’s solution is for an Apple Watch to be able to send an alarm message to nearby devices when a non-swimmer or small child unknowingly enters a deeper area of a swimming pool, sudden fatigue of a swimmer due to specific health issues, heart attack of a swimmer during a swim. The disclosed pool alarm system and method can be used as a standalone system or it can be integrated with other pool alarm or drowning detection systems for public swimming pools, including camera surveillance-based systems.
Summary of the patent
Here’s Apple’s abstract of the patent: “Embodiments are disclosed for a wearable device used as a digital pool attendant. In some embodiments, a method comprises: determining, with at least one processor of a wearable device, whether a user is swimming or not swimming based on sensor data; in accordance with the user not swimming, determining with the at least one processor and based on the sensor data, whether the user is showing regular or irregular behavior while swimming; and in accordance with the user showing irregular behavior, sending an alert message from the water over air to one or more other devices.”
I hope you’ll help support Apple World Today by becoming a patron. Almost all our income is from Patreon support and sponsored posts. Patreon pricing ranges from $2 to $10 a month. Thanks in advance for your support.
