A new research poster from the School of Continuous Improvement links 58 lifeguards' logged independent scanning to their tenure under an installed drowning-detection alarm, finding scanning falls as tenure lengthens even as the venue's own alarm-response-time compliance holds perfect.
A nine-pool audit ties independent scanning to alarm tenure, even as the same alarm's response-time compliance holds perfect throughout
An alarm that catches every drowning risk within four seconds looks, on paper, like nothing at the poolside has changed. A new research poster from the School of Continuous Improvement checked what a lifeguard was doing with their own eyes while that compliance record stayed spotless.
Dr Sten Okwuosa and Dr Joost Nwosu drew on existing overhead footage across nine public pools, coding how often each of 58 lifeguards scanned the water unprompted as the months they’d worked under an installed alarm accumulated. The venue’s own alarm-response-time compliance was audited on a separate track, against the vendor’s own event log, with its four-second threshold held constant throughout.
An alarm that never misses a beat can still be quietly doing all the watching.
— Dr Sten Okwuosa, Senior Research Fellow and Convenor, Impact Pathway Atlas, School of Continuous Improvement
Co-author Dr Joost Nwosu, whose own work follows a performance target once it’s been met, called the compliance figure “the cleanest case I’ve come across of a target that stopped needing anyone to notice it was still being hit.” For a school built around measurement, the pairing wears a familiar shape in a new setting: the audited number held still, and the behaviour underneath it did not.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.g1d4nv.