409 Dive Log Australasia December 24

The current trend among mainstream Taiwanese divers is to choose dive computers that do much more than track their dives. They are buying smartwatches that you can use both underwater and on land. Taiwanese companies Atmos and Crest, along with Garmin, a company with a factory in Taiwan, manufacture smart fitness watches which have full dive computer functionality - or, to put it the other way round, dive computers with many smart fitness watch features - and these brands are now responsible for an estimated 75% of the dive computer market in Taiwan. They not only track your decompression status while you dive - and even your air supply in some cases – they also monitor aspects of your physiological status whenever you are wearing them, on dives and between dives. The idea is that you never take them off. At a higher price level, the Apple Watch Ultra – with the Oceanic scuba diving App - and the Huawei Ultimate do the same thing, and legendary Finland-based diving computer manufacturer Suunto, now owned by a Chinese electronics company, is revamping its product line to catch up with this new trend. These companies are propelling dive computer technology into the future. We now have access to cutting-edge equipment to track our underwater adventures, unlike in the past, when dive computer technology lagged behind mobile phones by a decade or more. This could have a major impact on recruiting and training divers. Soon, many people who sign up for beginners’ courses will already own a smartwatch with an inbuilt scuba diving computer. This means that, right from dive one, they will be tracking their dive activity and Will Smartwatch dive computers change the way we dive? O ver the past few years, a minor revolution has occurred in the Taiwan scuba diving market, which is youthful, open-minded, and highly accepting of innovation.

status using a device they are already used to working with. This may even mark the end of learning to use dive tables! But the biggest news is that this generation of smartwatches may eventually lead to a huge leap forward in terms of dive safety. Let me explain. In 2017, I published a book called Scuba Physiological, a series of essays by researchers and specialists in diving medicine summarising what we know about what happens to our bodies when we dive. With their permission, I rewrote the essays in language that was easier for non-scientists like us to understand. A couple of the things they mentioned are particularly interesting when you think about where current smartwatch technology may be able to take us. Diving medicine professionals know that the probability that you will get decompression sickness (DCS) ranges from 2 to 5%, even when you follow your dive computer perfectly. Traditional dive computers have never been able to measure some of the factors that contribute to the onset of DCS, such as your body temperature or heartbeat. Nor do they have any way to predict your off gassing rate after surfacing. They do not know your heart condition or breathing rate or if you are young or old, fit, unfit, fat, or thin. They have no idea what physical activity you do between dives nor how well or poorly hydrated you may be. Personal physiological factors like exercise, fitness, obesity, genetics and how you respond to stress all affect how bubbles form in your body and how and where they grow. Without current, accurate information about all this, no computer can assess the risk of DCS accurately.

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DIVE LOG Australasia #409 - December ‘24

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