Some people decided that summer doesn’t have to be plagued with tragic statistics

Out of the Water

Product: SightBit drowning prevention system

Inventor: Adam Bismuth

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.”

Bismuth and his team harnessed artificial intelligence and image processing technologies to analyze real time data about swimmers and changes in the conditions of the sea, such as waves and unexpected currents. The system, which Bismuth says is “the world’s best lifeguard,” is called SightBit, an additional set of eyes that never lose sight of what’s happening in the water and on the beach. The system constantly “reads” the water in order to detect any sign of danger and provide warnings in advance, interfacing with the existing infrastructure of video cameras installed on the beach. It analyzes their video feeds to provide reliable insights in real-time and predictions based on aggregated data.

SightBit — which Bismuth notes is not out to replace lifeguards, just to make their jobs more efficient by giving better distance and warning — provides beach attendance breakdowns and predictions, alerts to dangers in the water such as rip-currents, inshore holes, vortexes, and wave height, alerts to children unattended on the beach or in close proximity to the water, and can automatically activate speakers to alert bathers they’re at risk, and even a drone to drop life-preservers and reach people in distress.

Bismuth is thrilled that the system is up and running in many sites around Israel, and not only at the beaches. Today this smart surveillance system is used by companies for security purposes, and was even used recently to find the victim of a crane accident who’d been missing for several weeks.