409 Dive Log Australasia December 24

But your smartwatch can detect much of this kind of data and can be programmed with other relevant information too. It monitors your physiological status all the time, and it would be straightforward to create a decompression algorithm that would use smartwatch records to assess levels of post-dive decompression stress and adjust recommended no decompression time accordingly. Perhaps sensors could even record the presence and quantity of bubbles in your bloodstream. It is worth considering where this may lead. You and the people you dive with have different medical histories, sleep patterns, height/weight ratios and exercise patterns. Your activities pre-dive and between dives will never be identical. One of you may have drunk more water than the other or taken more rest. In future, therefore, two divers may have the same dive history and use the same smartwatch dive computer, but considering individual factors, their computers may give them different no-stop times. In certain circumstances, a computer may even recommend that a diver should wait before they do the dive they planned, perhaps until they have rested longer or are better hydrated. It might even force the diver to wait by refusing to function as a dive computer until its sensors assess that the diver is ready. Would you accept this? Some technical divers have already experienced this dilemma. The controller for the Poseidon Cis-Lunar Mk VI rebreather has a dive/no dive function. If it detects that something is not right - the gas mixture, the oxygen sensor, or the electronics, for example – it will not go into dive mode and remain un-diveable until whatever it thinks is wrong is fixed. The manufacturer believes that is a sensible feature that saves lives. But not every rebreather diver likes it. Imagine how frustrating it could be to be ready to get in the water, only for your computer to refuse to go into dive mode. How would you react? Before you answer, consider this. Other rebreather models (not the Poseidon) have alarms that advise the diver not to dive when they detect that something is wrong. But the diver can reject this advice and go ahead with the dive anyway. Unlike the Poseidon, these rebreathers don’t refuse to work. They just metaphorically shrug their shoulders and let the diver get on with it. The short history of sport rebreather diving includes several instances where a diver has responded to a rebreather warning by just switching the alarm off and going diving anyway, only to end up drowning. If, like the Poseidon electronics, a smartwatch dive computer ends up being able to judge our fitness to dive better than we can, would you buy one and follow its advice? Likely, we will all soon have to answer this question. www.divelog.net.au

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