When Eyal Golan purchased a standard pool alarm for his backyard swimming pool, he was quickly annoyed by how sensitive and ineffective this standard alarm was. “Wind can trigger them, even if it’s 3 a.m.,” he says, “most critically, you must turn them off when using the pool, and then kids are in the pool for hours [with little] to protect them.”
So Golan set out to make something better than any pool alarm on the market. “Being a software engineer, I thought of developing an AI/computer vision-based system that can “see” the pool 24/7,” says Golan. Enter Coral Detection Systems.
Coral is designed with a camera to view under the pool’s surface and detect what it sees. It can tell the difference between a human and another object in the pool. But most crucially, it can detect when a person is motionless under the water for several seconds.
The Coral Manta gives you greater peace of mind by monitoring your pool 24/7. It connects to your smartphone and tablets and sounds a short alert each time someone enters the pool. As soon as it sees a person motionless and with their head under the water, it’ll blast a loud alarm that’ll also sounds to all paired smartphones/tablets and to a plug-in home unit.
With Coral, you’ll never have to worry about activating or deactivating an alarm, or covering or uncovering your pool. And Coral is extremely smart—its artificial intelligence continues to learn and improve as you identify which alarms are false and which are true, meaning its false alarm rate will drop to close to zero over time.
Last year, Olympian gold medalist Bode Miller endorsed Coral Manta. Miller and his wife lost their 19-month-old daughter in a drowning accident in a neighbor’s pool in 2018, and have since advocated for pool safety, recommending measures like swimming lessons, training, and new technology like Coral Manta. “If the Coral Manta was installed in our neighbor’s pool, I don’t think my daughter would have drowned,” Miller told WDIV.
The Coral Manta is powered with solar panels on top of the device and includes a long-lasting battery and power cord for backup. The Coral Shell, identical to the Manta in terms of functionality, has no solar panel and must be connected to a power source via a cable most of the time.
Coral mounts to the corner of your pool, where it can see below the surface of the entire pool. It requires a direct line of sight to function properly—it covers all standard residential backyard pools, but for larger or nonrectangular pools you may need a second unit. Water clarity is also crucial to Coral’s operation. “Typically, a pool that is maintained just with chlorine tablets will not have the water clarity level needed,” says Golan. But a well-maintained pool with pumps and filters operating daily will have the required clarity level. “The real test would be to get in the water and using goggles, look across the pool from one end to the other,” says Golan. “If you can’t see the other end, then Coral may not see it either.”
Coral even functions at night. It uses water sensors to detect abnormal movement in the water’s surface, and has a built-in illuminator to light up the pool so it can see any people who may be in the water. If it doesn’t see anyone, it’ll still send you a notification that there was water movement.
While Coral is designed to protect against almost all drowning cases, remember that it’s no substitute for adult supervision whenever children are in the pool. Coral works as a complement to all the usual pool safety precautions you would take, aiming to reduce the number of drowning accidents and make the pool a safer place for everyone.
For more information, visit coraldrowningdetection.com.
