
Sightbit deploys AI on beaches to help lifeguards spot distressed swimmers - dsavant
https://venturebeat.com/2020/06/26/sightbit-deploys-ai-on-beaches-to-help-lifeguards-spot-distressed-swimmers/
======
speedgoose
The air traffic control sector is very dubious about AI in general because
they need situation awareness at any time, and they don't want to rely on a
system that will eventually fail.

Did sighbit measure the situation awareness of lifeguards with and without
their solution? Are they sure lifeguards will not rely on the AI, potentially
miss obvious distressed swimmers, and be useless when the system completely
fail?

Will the lifeguards who always used this system will be trained and not panic
when the system will fail, for example because of a power outage?

~~~
elmo2you
I fear it might be even worse than that. But first let me clarify: I'm not
against people using technology to augment their natural capabilities. On the
contrary.

However, I see a big risk in how this could cause a trend of less qualified
(cheaper) lifeguards, hired by people who might feel more pressure regarding
budgets than actual safety (probably lands mostly on the "lifeguards" neck
anyways).

Considering how everything these days is run with a (often bad) cost/benefit
analysis, I'm everything but positive about the "unforeseen" side effects of
AI in this field.

As difficult as it is to spot a single drowning person in a sea of people (no
pun intended), it might in fact be partly the feeling of sole responsibility
that keeps (good) lifeguards as alert as they often are. I'm not so sure that
AI will have a positive sum effect on that.

~~~
Tade0
_However, I see a big risk in how this could cause a trend of less qualified
(cheaper) lifeguards_

A lifeguard is currently already a minimum-wage job. Also there's a ton of
seasonal workers who aren't exactly that qualified to begin with.

------
catalogia
This is interesting technology, however I fear it will breed complacency in
lifeguards. I worked as a lifeguard off and on for a few years when I was in
highschool and college so I can say from experience, sneaking boredom is a
problem you have to actively guard yourself against. It's a job where 99.999%
of the time nothing bad happens, but you're supposed to be ready for that
0.001% in an instant; that's easier said than done. I'm not sure a system like
this would have a productive effect on lifeguards.

If these systems are coupled with the right sort of training, they might be a
net benefit. Or maybe the system could be designed in such a way that
_requires_ the lifeguard to stay attentive, such as requiring the lifeguard to
input the current headcount. If the lifeguard's headcount starts to disagree
with the computer's, that could be a signal that the lifeguard has become
fatigued and needs to call in another lifeguard or call people out of the
pool. (If the system isn't accurate enough to be used in this way, then
perhaps it's not ready for use at all.)

~~~
jlg23
> I'm not sure a system like this would have a productive effect on
> lifeguards.

> If these systems are coupled with the right sort of training, they might be
> a net benefit. Or maybe the system could be designed in such a way that
> requires the lifeguard to stay attentive, such as requiring the lifeguard to
> input the current headcount.

I too worked as a lifeguard and I think only a really bad implementation can
have a counter-productive effect. Spontaneously, I can think of sunglasses
with AR-overlay and a feedback loop:

* mark all people in field of view, color coded

* let lifeguard acknowledge/ignore problems

* allow for "problem"-handover to next post (e.g. if busy or if it is a swimmer in a current)

What definitely does not help is to have lifeguards behind monitors because
they'd miss out on 99% of the real daily "action": dealing with littering,
violence, ordinance violations, answering questions, pointing new arrivals
towards safe zones....

------
noodlesUK
Is it just me, or are there some sketchy privacy feelings surrounding this? Do
beaches currently have CCTV systems? The idea of creating a large corpus of
videos of people in potentially quite revealing swimwear, particularly when
there’s children in frame seems like a bad idea privacy wise. I don’t know
that there are necessarily any legal problems, but it just feels not okay.

~~~
amcoastal
Yes, it's quite common to have cameras pointed at the surf-zone, both public
and private. Surfers and beachgoers use them to decide where and when to go to
the beach. Utilizing these untapped resources with AI has been brimming with
potential for awhile now for things such as this.

------
ramanan
Spotting a distressed swimmer is possibly much harder than most people expect.

There is a great website where you can try your spotting skills yourself [1].

[1] [http://spotthedrowningchild.com/](http://spotthedrowningchild.com/)

~~~
shultays
Aren't those buoy rings a bit too large? Most of those drowning kids seems to
be having difficulty climbing them back.

------
ejfox
Does it work on people of color? Seems like a potentially deadly oversight
considering what we know about existing failures in object-detection.

~~~
ponker
And what we know about drowning rates, which for black children are more than
5x as high as for white children.

~~~
mschuster91
That's not inherently linked to the children being black, it's more linked to
Black people being significantly more poor, as a result have _way_ less access
to swimming pools or vacations on water bodies, and therefore drown more due
to lack of training.

~~~
ponker
I didn’t say it was inherent in being black, but if you are selling a drowning
prevention technology, it’s imperative that it work well for dark-skinned
people. As someone with dark skin I can say that the problem of tech products
(Automatic red eye reduction, “Facetune” style image tuning, Face recognition
login) not working as well for us is very real.

------
adfm
With all the wildfire danger of the past few years and climate change being
what it is, you'd think utility companies, like PG&E, would have something
similar deployed across their transmission network for early notification. Pop
a commodity 360 camera in a weatherized enclosure on top of all transmission
towers, take a GPS reading, plug feed into a model trained on smoke and bright
flashes, send a link to the live feed for a human to review.

