Apple Watch saves lives. This is a documented fact and Apple even put together a video containing those who believe Apple saved their lives.

Today Apple Watch can detect dangers related to your heart, detect when you've experienced a dangerous fall or have been in a car crash and call for help.

Yesterday, a new Apple patent was published that details a safety SOS feature related to swimmers in danger.

Apple notes in their patent background that every year more than 3,500 people in the United States die from drowning. Drowning is also the fifth most common cause of accidental death in the country and most people who die by drowning are children.

The average person can hold breath for about 30 seconds. For children, the length is shorter. A person who is in excellent health and has training for underwater emergencies can still only hold their breath for about 2 minutes. If a person is submerged 4-6 minutes in water without resuscitation, brain damage and eventually death by drowning will occur.

Apple's invention covers a future Apple Watch being used as a digital pool attendant. In some embodiments, a method comprises: determining, with at least one processor of a wearable device, whether a user is swimming or not swimming based on sensor data; in accordance with the user not swimming, determining with the at least one processor and based on the sensor data, whether the user is showing regular or irregular behavior while swimming; and in accordance with the user showing irregular behavior, sending an alert message to one or more other devices.

This new Apple Watch could provide a cost effective pool alarm system solution that can be deployed in every type of freshwater pool, including public and private swimming pools and also natural freshwater pools (e.g., lakes, ponds, etc.), where above-water and underwater cameras would be impractical.

Examples of use cases include but are not limited to sending an alarm message to nearby devices when a non-swimmer or small child unknowingly enters a deeper area of a swimming pool, sudden fatigue of a swimmer due to specific health issues, heart attack of a swimmer during a swim.

The disclosed pool alarm system and method can be used as a standalone system or it can be integrated with other pool alarm or drowning detection systems for public swimming pools, including camera surveillance-based systems.

Apple patent FIG. 1 below is a system overview of a pool safety monitoring system that uses wearable devices. In the example scenario shown, user #100 is swimming and wearing a smartwatch on their wrist. The smartwatch includes a swimming analytics application that can determine limb coordination, swimming style and various other metrics and other information that are good indicators of swimming.

In some embodiments, the swimming metrics and other information (e.g., heart rate, blood oxygen levels) are input into a machine learning model (e.g., a deep learning network) that has been trained to classify a swimmer showing regular or irregular behavior when in the water. When a swimmer is in distress (e.g., due to a heart attack), the user's underwater behavior becomes irregular as described in reference to FIG. 2.

The irregular behavior is reflected in the swimming analytics metrics and other information, such as heart rate or other vital signs. In response to the machine learning model classifying the swimmer's behavior in the water, a wireless transceiver embedded on the smartwatch broadcasts a radio frequency (RF) message to nearby devices #102 in the pool or on the pool deck, such as smartphones, tablet computers, smartwatches, laptop computers, or a monitoring and control station, etc. The users of the nearby devices #102 are presented with the message on their respective displays, through an audible alert (e.g., a beep, siren, ringtone, spoken alert) and/or through haptic feedback (e.g., vibration) to get the attention of bystanders who can offer their assistance to the distressed swimmer or call for emergency first responders.

Apple's patent FIG. 2A above illustrates both what regular and irregular swimmers posture should and shouldn't be. A significant deviation from this reference posture can indicate irregular behavior.

For example, the relative positions of the swimmer's legs, torso, head and arms, can indicate irregular behavior associated with a swimmer in distress or a swimmer who is unconscious. Other positions can also be detected, including but not limited to a diving position, standing in water, etc. In addition to inertial sensors on the smartwatch, a heart rate sensor on smartwatch measures the swimmer's heart rate which may suddenly elevate when the swimmer is in a panic, or their blood oxygen level (e.g., VO2 max) may suddenly drop if the swimmer cannot breathe.

Apple's patent FIG. 3 above is a block diagram of a pool alarm system #300 that uses wearable devices, according to one or more embodiments. An application layer of system 300 includes metrics analysis #301, which includes biosignals #302 and swimming analytics #303.

In some embodiments, the metrics are output by one or more machine learning models (e.g., classifier, regression models). The metrics are used as training data #304 to train the machine learning model(s) to predict that a user is swimming or not swimming and if not swimming, whether the swimmer is showing regular or irregular behavior in the water, and confidence levels for the predictions, such as probability value indicating the accuracy of the prediction.

For full details, review Apple's patent application 20240105043.