La Jornada: Cameras with artificial intelligence detect suicide attempts on Seoul bridges

Seoul. Cameras equipped with artificial intelligence (AI) are helping to prevent suicides on bridges over Seoul’s Han River. When they detect that someone may be about to jump, they activate an alarm to respond quickly.

The river is a symbol of the South Korean capital, but also a frequent scene of despair in a country with one of the highest suicide rates in the world.

The AI ​​surveillance system alerts first responders if someone lingers in certain areas, enters a zone considered dangerous, or picks up one of the phones installed to prevent suicides.

The method has been effective, said Kim Jun-young, director of the Hangang Bridge Integrated Control Center. The rescue rate on the river has increased from 56 percent in 2012 to over 99 percent.

Emergency teams can reach most bridges in less than five minutes, the critical window for intervention and saving a life, he noted.

Other people may decide in a split second, when they hear the sirens approaching, before help arrives.

Last year, the nearly 900 cameras on 17 bridges identified more than 1,200 incidents, he said. There were “about eight people” they were unable to save.

The country is grappling with a suicide crisis that President Lee Jae-myung has called “a disgrace on the world stage.”

The suicide rate in 2024 exceeded 29 deaths per 100,000 people, the highest figure since 2011. According to the government, it is the leading cause of death among people aged 10 to 49.

Koreans in their early twenties make up the largest proportion of people treated in emergency rooms after suicide attempts, said Yoo Jae-hyun, director of suicide prevention at St. Mary’s Catholic Hospital in Seoul.

Smiling Stone Hwang, a 33-year-old cartoonist, is one of these survivors. After losing her father to suicide in 2014, she inherited his debts and endured years of lawsuits and asset seizures.

Suicide “didn’t feel like a tragic choice, but rather a rational one,” Hwang said.

In Japan, which also has a very high suicide rate, the company Asilla has developed a similar AI-powered surveillance system that detects unusual behavior, such as someone preparing to jump from a great height.

In two separate incidents, it alerted guards to men standing on rooftops who were then persuaded to come down, explained product manager Yuka Suzuki.

However, none of these tools replaces humans and is not a magic bullet for suicides, he acknowledges.

But it is significant “if we can reduce the number of incidents in which people lose their lives in the blink of an eye,” he says.

In Seoul, for example, security guard Kim recounts the case of a young man who was stopped with the help of the system and returned that same day to try again, this time successfully.