Poolview Iris™ at Andover Leisure Centre

New safety feature at Andover Leisure Centre

Drowning Prevention Week aims to equip everybody across the UK and Ireland with the skills and knowledge to make the right decisions about water safety.  

This week is ideally timed, focusing on the lead up to summer, where the risk of accidental drowning increases significantly. 

At Places Leisure, we don’t take water safety lightly and at Andover Leisure Centre, we are proud to have specialist technology to support our lifeguarding in ensuring the safety of all customers.  

What is Poolview Iris™?

Poolview Iris™ is a piece of innovative technology designed using proactive and reactive software and hardware. It utilises supervision technology to assist our lifeguarding team in the detection of drowning incidents. 

The system fits in with current working practices, enabling our lifeguards to systemically scan the images on the monitor as well as the surface of the water to ensure the constant supervision of swimmers. This means all zones are proactively supervised, and the team can make informed decisions at an early stage of intervention.

The concept of proactive lifeguarding is about early intervention and the act of preventing accidents from developing to a critical stage. Poolview Iris™ streams live data through to the monitors positioned next to lifeguards on poolside. These images show live footage from the eight underwater pool cameras, providing 100% below water visibility. This real-time view of what’s happening supports the job of the lifeguards and minimises the impact glare, reflection and turbulence may have on assessing pool safety. 

The reactive component tracks each individual swimmer, monitoring their activity until it detects a possible incident unfolding. At this point, the system alerts the lifeguard to the potential drowning incident through a visual and audible ‘yellow alert’. Without human intervention or change in the swimmer’s behaviour this develops into a ‘red alert’ on the monitor. The lifeguard at these points can either acknowledge and silence the alarm or escalate the alarm, implement the emergency action plan, and rescue the swimmer. 

Should the lifeguard miss the ‘red alert’, the Poolview Iris™ system will enter a fully automatic mode that cannot be silenced without critical intervention. This will instigate an alarm in both the pool area and at main reception.

Poolview Iris™ 2020 from Poolview Limited on Vimeo.