Everyday Analytics

Dec 1, 2007 12:00 PM, By Stephanie Silk

A place that can be as much fun as it may be unsafe is a swimming pool. Along with the uses of video analytics familiar to those in the security market, the technology's usefulness is rising above the water to provide a little help for a big market: swimming pool safety.

According to the National Center for Health Statistics, childhood drowning is the second leading accidental cause of death for children under 14 in the United States. To help curb these incidents, a 75-year veteran pool deck equipment manufacturer and supplier company, S.R. Smith, came together with Cernium Corp., a developer of real-time video analytics, to develop a product called PoolOptix.

PoolOptix is a management tool that mitigates the risks associated with unattended or unsupervised swimming pools. According to Brett Fritts, vice president of strategy and marketing for S.R. Smith, these risks vary depending on the customer setting. “On the commercial side, the threats are more about vandalism, theft and contamination. On the residential side, it's more about drowning prevention.”

Fritts generated the idea for PoolOptix 15 years ago, a time when pool alarms were becoming a major market in the swimming pool industry. “We looked at what technology existed, and we saw that there was a big gap in coverage around the pool,” Fritts says. “We have [alarms] that focus on activity in the water, and those that provide barriers to gaining access to the pool, but nothing detection-oriented for once they are inside the pool area.”

The company approached Cernium, which launched its flagship program, Perceptrak, four years ago. Used for surveillance, Perceptrak' video analysis and behavioral recognition technology is made possible by its analytics engine, P-Core. Craig Chambers, CEO of Cernium Corp., says that due to S.R. Smith's demand for safety and security products based on recent legislation, the pool company teamed with Cernium a year ago after doing research on sensors.

“It was an unusual request, but it fit nicely with the direction we are going,” Chambers says. “We have always been a commercial-oriented company, so we have our antenna out all the time for commercial opportunities, and we are always looking for ways to mainstream video analytics technology.”

PoolOptix uses the same technology as more broadly applicable products, but it has been optimized to be set up and operated by someone who is not as technically trained. The algorithms are set up to detect people, and a clutter rejection feature ignores movement from rippling water, an effect that might confuse other systems.

“This product creates zones of protection around pools and is user-friendly, making it easy for someone who is untrained to use it, like a hotel manager,” Chambers says.

Detecting everything above water, the device is configurable and outfitted for each specific environment it is in, whether it be a public recreation center or a neighborhood private pool. Depending on how the user wants the system to react, it can trigger a strobe light, horn, siren or it can send an e-mail or text message to a security guard.

PoolOptix just finished development and will be moving into beta test-sites to be up and running this month. “We anticipate that parks and recreation will leave it on during the day to use as workforce management, and the consumer side may leave it on all the time for unsupervised children,” he says.

Though it's not their usual market, Chambers says that Cernium is proud to bring video analytics to a more visible environment. “This has a very broad appeal to a number of folks. This technology will eventually become adopted to the mainstream because people see it in an environment that they are familiar with. So instead of seeing it as something exotic that only the government deals with, they see a swimming pool, and they see how it might be effective for them,” Chambers says.

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© 2008 Penton Media Inc.

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