Sun, sand, surf and now smartphones are part of the beach experience for the nation's lifesavers who perform about 12,000 rescues a year.
Surf Life Saving Australia has introduced a suite of mobile risk apps and will pilot a tracking app in March.
The tracker app, created with Australian mobile experience developer Alive Mobile, will enable users to track lifesaving resources in real time.
"So if they (lifesavers) know where a jet-ski is exactly in the ocean, they can assign it to a beach quickly," SLSA national IT manager Gary Daly said.
The federal government-funded tracker app will also allow lifesavers to log information such as hazards on a beach like a rip, where flags are located and the presence of bluebottles, and present it to the existing public-facing beach information app BeachSafe.
The tracker app will be piloted in beaches in Sydney in March and April before being fully rolled out across the country.
Potentially any of the country's 40,000 lifesavers who own a smartphone will be able to use the application via their member login.
"So not only will we be able to respond quicker to the needs of the public that require our services, but we are also able to track the whereabouts of our members who are utilising the technology to ensure that their welfare and safety is maintained," SLSA coastal safety services manager Matthew Thompson said.
He said a "world first" suite of apps for lifesavers, used on smartphones and tablets, was being used to undertake risk assessment procedures.
These include detailed analysis and tracking of conditions and potential hazards.
"So traditionally there was a lot of completion of manual forms and a lot of manual labour going into compiling the reports," Mr Thompson said. "Through the use of the mobile apps a lot of that process is now automated."
The information now automatically flows into report templates and the organisation's comprehensive databases, including the Australian Beach Safety and Management Program, the country's most comprehensive database of coastal information.
"At the moment, we only patrol and service 4 per cent of Australia's beaches and in order for us to check up and get around to all the beaches we have had to find more efficient and effective ways to carry out this process," Mr Thompson said. The suite of apps includes a water safety risk management app and an event risk management app.
Alive Mobile is currently investigating an enterprise app management system for SLSA.
"Alive are also involved with us at the moment in scoping an enterprise "apps store" that will help us manage all of these applications and their users in our organisation," Mr Daly said.
