How do you prevent folks from going out, having a good time, and then accidentally stumbling around and getting hit by a train? In Japan, the answer is you watch for drunk behavior via cameras.

That's what Japanese railway company JR West is doing at Kyobashi station in Osaka, Japan. They installed a system composed of 46 cameras this week that will automatically monitor for signs of drunkenness, including sleeping and waiting aimlessly. The idea is that human attendants will then make the call on what to do.

As the Japan Times noted back in April, JR West has been looking at how to thwart drunken tumbles for some time. The company took a look at the 1,900 falls involving alcohol from 2012 and found that 60 percent of those had the tumbler sitting on a bench in a stupor prior to lunging up and falling onto the tracks. At the time, they considered reorienting the benches.

If you can read Japanese (or enjoy the oddities of Google Translate), you can read more about how the surveillance system works in their press release. For now it's only in use at the one station, but could potentially be expanded based on how useful it becomes.

If nothing else, we can hope for some very solid YouTube videos out of Osaka in the near future.

Source: The Wall Street Journal via The Verge

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