Some people decided that summer doesn’t have to be plagued with tragic statistics
Adam Bismuth, a young entrepreneur and inventor from Tel Aviv, was once at the Dead Sea when he heard the hysterical shrieks from the shore: Someone was drowning (although people falsely assume that it’s impossible to drown in the Dead Sea), and the lifeguard was too far away to rescue the victim in time. The image haunted Bismuth for months.
“It was a very long strip of beach and there was really nothing the lifeguard could do,” Bismuth says. “But I just couldn’t run away from the images of the tragedy, from the helplessness of it all. Yet I also realized that it’s often unrealistic to expect the rescue services to arrive in time, when literally every second counts, when the window of opportunity from the moment someone starts to drown is very short, and time is generally not in their favor.”
Bismuth, who has been a developer and innovator for over a decade, knew what he had to do: He would design an early-warning system able not only to detect a drowning person in real time, but also to predict a tragedy in the making based on weather and water conditions, crowd size, and other factors that will generally precede a drowning.
How does it work?
“After lots of beach and shore research, my team and I realized that detecting a person while he is drowning is already too late,” he explains, describing the third leading cause of accidental death worldwide. “Drowning is a rapid event, inflicting life-long brain damage after 20 seconds and death after about 30 seconds. So we decided to shift our direction and instead looked into all the factors that create an environment for drownings to happen. We concluded that about 70 percent of drownings occur because of the conditions of the sea and that we needed to develop an algorithm that would identify dangers in the sea conditions and then ‘predict’ the specific people in the area most susceptible to drowning.”
Create a free account to keep reading.
