The Florida Department of Children and Families says more children under 5 die by drowning in Florida than in any other state.
This is something pediatrician Dr. Phillip Matar knows firsthand. Back when he was a medical resident, he was part of a team that worked to revive a little girl who had drowned in the family pool. The girl didn’t survive and when her mom heard she had died, the mother had a seizure and had to be hospitalized.
Matar said that incident changed his life.
“And I kind of made a promise to myself at that point that I would do everything I could to figure out how to stop kids from drowning in pools, because we saw it over and over and over again, in our pediatric residency. And you know, this happens every single day across the U.S., but specifically so here in Florida,” Matar said.
His friend, Dr. Ramy Gali, also worked to help a 16-year-old in a near-drowning. The teen survived but suffered traumatic brain damage and would never be able to live independently.
The two physicians teamed up to create a drowning-prevention device. They called it Pool Knight.
They worked with a former Lockheed Martin engineer, David May, to design it.
Matar said while the focus is on preventing young children from drowning, Pool Knight will also work with older children and vulnerable adults.
“A 16-year-old, who is 6 feet tall, but he has a seizure disorder, or he has Type 1 diabetes, and should never be at the pool by themselves, you can actually through our app activate the facial recognition technology. And with one screenshot of that individual’s face, you can program specific parameters for specific people,” Matar said.
Pool Knight has been patented in the U.S., Canada and Australia and uses infrared heat sensors, motion sensors, video, audio, and artificial intelligence with facial recognition to keep vulnerable people and animals out of the water, by sounding an on-site alarm and sending alerts to connected mobile phones through a dedicated app. But it’s not available yet.
“Yes, we're not on the market yet. And the reason that we're not there is, this is truly life or death in terms of the device doing what we want it to do," Matar said. "And so, we would not feel comfortable kind of having this out there unless we have a very close to a year's worth of testing, which is what we will have in the next four months or so.”
He said at that point, they’ll be comfortable saying it’s ready for market. And they already have manufacturers ready to produce Pool Knight on a mass scale.
There are other resources and tools to prevent drowning. Among them, the wearable WAVE device, designed for children to use while swimming. Read more about it here.
Here are some other websites which provide water safety information:
- Florida Department of Health
- WaterSmartFL
- Florida State Alliance of YMCAS
- The Ounce of Prevention Fund Florida
- The Friendship Circle provides "5 Water Safety Resources for Children with Special Needs"
- Water Safety for Families with Children with Special Needs (video from Safe Kids Worldwide)
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