Victoria University students Chamonix Stuart & Hannah Tilsley have designed a system to help prevent drownings in rip currents.
It's a floating buoy which can detect a rip current, and change colour depending on the danger to warn swimmers.
They've made it to the top 20 of the 2019 James Dyson Design Award, beating out over 1,000 designs from 27 countries.
Stuart says the buoy changes colour from red to green to orange, similar to a traffic light, which is projected from the top so people can see it from the beach.
Tilsley and Stuart both spent much of their childhoods in the Coromandel and have both seen people get stuck in rips.
“We know the dangers of rips and have lots of friends in the lifeguard industry - that’s how we found out that 80 percent of drownings are caused by rips,” Tilsley says.
Tilsley says the red light means don’t swim, orange indicates caution, and green means it’s safe to swim.
“We’re hoping it will teach people about rips a bit because if you’re standing on the beach and you see one area red, and one area green, you could compare and see why one area is different to another,” Tilsley says.
Stuart says neither of them had much experience in coding, so the project was a bit of a learning curve.
She says the buoy is still at a prototype stage and needs a bit more development before it can be deployed.
Ideally, they said, the buoys would be deployed by lifeguards. They also have additional functions. For instance, they can be set to always red and placed in dangerous parts of beaches to let people know to not swim there. Another function would allow lifeguards to change the signal via an app if there was a shark in the water or another danger present.
The pair’s focus at the moment is to finish up their degrees at university, then they plan on having a sit-down and figuring out how they go further with the buoy.
“We’d love to develop it further, it’d be a shame to just see it go after all the hard work,” Tilsley says.
