O2 + CO analyzer choices.

[nimoh]

OK, so probably not too far off, but sub-optimal.. 1% error certainly isn't significant in itself, but if too many of them start adding up all the same way, it can get to be significant..

if too many of what start adding up?

 

[Seymour Fisch]

I think you're kinda glossing over a couple of little points, the more obvious being that coo2 isn't actually cheap. It's affordable. As I said upthread, if it were cheap there'd be no excuse not to have one.

Good point. It's now in the ballpark of oxygen analyzers, so that's probably an optimistic upper bound on how big of a market would be possible in the short term. Yeah, if these were like $20, that'd be huge...

The other one is you need to program your O2 percent into your DC in order to get its toxicity calculations right, so you want to know exactly what's in the tank. That's normal procedure. CO poisoning, OTOH, is not normal procedure: it's accidental on the order of "stuff happens".

I would say, take the proportion of CO poisonings to cases of DCS/LOO, and the courses should pay the proportional amount of attention to each. I suspect my OW instructor got it about right: we were told about CO, how it gets there, etc.

Your comparison with O2 toxicity and O2 analysis is a really good one. We consider it "normal procedure" to analyze a tank for O2, then program our computers. But why? How many cases of oxygen toxicity happen, versus cases of DCS? I don't know, but I'm guessing it's also really low.

Suppose O2 analyzers cost $10,000 instead of a few hundred, and suppose that we therefore had a similar attitude to nitrox that we do for CO: "Only use a reputable fill station for nitrox. If you're worried, ask them to see their most recent O2 analysis report. For the blend that they say they provided, don't dive below the MOD. If you notice any of the following symptoms..., ascend and terminate your dive." How many cases of ox tox would we observe?

I'm a new diver, so I don't know much, but in my vacation diving in assorted places, I'm guessing that if people were as cavalier about O2 as they are about CO, we still wouldn't see many ox tox incidents. (No, I am NOT advocating this! Just exploring the analogy with CO analysis.) I doubt good dive shops screw up their blends very often, nor by very much. And most divers I've seen on nitrox weren't pushing the limits on depth or exposure time. Lots of people dive nitrox because they feel better or think they do. Or they want an extra safety margin, with air tables or computers set for air. Or the dive op provided it for free, so why not? Etc. And not everyone instantly gets convulsions upon violating exposure limits -- it's a probabilistic, poorly understood thing. So, if we handled O2 analysis of nitrox analogously to how we treat CO, we'd just see an occasional Accident/Incident report, where someone convulsed or died, and after the fact, a tank got analyzed and was found to have a wrong mix, or more often, no analysis would be done, and people would just speculate that maybe it was ox tox, since the symptoms matched. In other words, we'd observe something very similar to what we see with CO now.

Anyway, getting back to the COOTwo... if they get people saying, "Hey, I'm supposed to buy an O2 analyzer, and this one does CO, too!" and get a bunch of sales that way, and then those people start considering CO analysis a routine part of their normal behavior, and then they start talking about "that one time" when they were on a dive boat somewhere and a tank tested positive for CO, and attitudes start changing, and suddenly, there's a whole new market. (An analogy that just came to mind: I don't know about elsewhere, but around here, helmets for skiers went from something that no one wore, to only little kids, to almost everyone, over the course of about 10 years.)

 

[KenGordon]

Suppose O2 analyzers cost $10,000 instead of a few hundred, and suppose that we therefore had a similar attitude to nitrox that we do for CO: "Only use a reputable fill station for nitrox. If you're worried, ask them to see their most recent O2 analysis report. For the blend that they say they provided, don't dive below the MOD. If you notice any of the following symptoms..., ascend and terminate your dive." How many cases of ox tox would we observe?

A significant difference is that people DELIBERATELY have rich nitrox mixes. Thus the confusion and so error can happen no matter how good the shop. If you took any cylinder from my garage today diving you'd want an analyser or be trusting your life to me actually labelling stuff properly.

 

[dmaziuk]

A significant difference is that people DELIBERATELY have rich nitrox mixes.

There's also the how: if you had a factory-calibrated gizmo that always pipes out EAN32 that'd be like air: trust the compressor. (But then you couldn't offer EAN36 or higher.) If you're mixing 90+% pure O2 (that e.g. a $500 medical concentrator can deliver) with air, you need to check if you got it right afterwards.

 

[RJP]

(An analogy that just came to mind: I don't know about elsewhere, but around here, helmets for skiers went from something that no one wore, to only little kids, to almost everyone, over the course of about 10 years.)

I've written about ski helmets as the perfect example of a disruptive innovation in the past. Not only did sales of ski helmets take off... but the wide availability and acceptance of helmets actually helped increase the popularity of skiing. Especially among families with young kids. (Possibly at the expense of things like scuba diving, in fact.)

 

[dmaziuk]

I've written about ski helmets as the perfect example of a disruptive innovation in the past. Not only did sales of ski helmets take off... but the wide availability and acceptance of helmets actually helped increase the popularity of skiing. Especially among families with young kids. (Possibly at the expense of things like scuba diving, in fact.)

And this is where marketing wins: if you believe the wiki of a thousand lies, helmets made no difference to the number of fatalities nor of head injuries among skiers, yet the most skiers are now wearing them.

There is another quite different perfect example of a disruptive innovation: what's been happening to energy utilities in the last few years, esp. over in .eu: there was no innovation per se, just steady progress on existing technologies coupled with politics coupled with market fluctuations.

 

[Seymour Fisch]

A significant difference is that people DELIBERATELY have rich nitrox mixes. Thus the confusion and so error can happen no matter how good the shop. If you took any cylinder from my garage today diving you'd want an analyser or be trusting your life to me actually labelling stuff properly.

Cool! I think you're onto two separate issues, that I hadn't thought of before. The first is that for people blending their own custom mixes, or diving multiple gasses, etc., it seems very likely that there'd be a higher probability of error, justifying the need for the analysis step, versus just catching the off chance of a compressor overheating for a moment or whatever. I don't have stats, but that seems very plausible.

But for lots of random schmucks like me, when diving nitrox, it's exactly this scenario:

There's also the how: if you had a factory-calibrated gizmo that always pipes out EAN32 that'd be like air: trust the compressor.

yet the cultural norm is still to analyze each tank.

And it hit me that part of the problem for the CO analysis market is that safety just isn't cool. What's cool is to push the limits, extend your capabilities, take some risks, boldly go where no man has gone before. For nitrox, the value proposition wasn't "Analyze your tanks so you can dive just like before but be slightly safer." (which is the pitch for CO analyzers). The pitch was "Here's this weird, high-tech voodoo gas that let's you extend your bottom time and accelerate deco, but there's a risk you'll go into convulsions and die a horrible death." Now, THAT's cool! And the brave pioneers of nitrox diving managed that increased risk by adopting training and procedures that included oxygen analysis. So then, the highest-status, most advanced divers that everyone looked up to, they were the ones doing gas analysis, so it was really natural for the ordinary schmoes like me to follow suit. When I go to a highly reputable dive shop, in a first-world country, and ask for a couple tanks of EAN32 from their factory-calibrated gizmo and banked and dispensed to dozens of divers per day, doing the oxygen analysis probably doesn't add much to my safety, but I do it because all the cool kids do it.

Way way up-thread, several tech divers said they'd be interested in this device if it did helium, too, and DiveNav replied that it'd be too expensive, for too small of a market. But now I wonder if maybe the way to get the CO analysis market to take off is to first make something for the god-like tech divers, that does O2, He, CO, CO2, water vapor, the thermal conductivity of your drysuit inflation argon, etc. And then donate these to some high-profile expeditions, to make sure every knows what the cool kids are doing.

I've written about ski helmets as the perfect example of a disruptive innovation in the past. Not only did sales of ski helmets take off... but the wide availability and acceptance of helmets actually helped increase the popularity of skiing. Especially among families with young kids. (Possibly at the expense of things like scuba diving, in fact.)

I don't know elsewhere, but around here, there's still a surprising amount of resistance to bicycle helmets. But if you think about it, pro ski racers wear helmets, so there's an image of ski helmets being cool. Whereas pro bicycle racers still don't wear (credible) helmets, so bicycle helmets are still viewed as dorky.

Anyway, I'm no marketing professional, and I think we're starting to hijack this thread, so I'll shut up now. I don't own an oxygen analyzer yet, and I have mixed feelings about my cheapie CO analyzer, so I'm eagerly awaiting the first reviews of the COOTwo.

 

[RJP]

Whereas pro bicycle racers still don't wear (credible) helmets, so bicycle helmets are still viewed as dorky.

The first part of that ain't true. At all. The pros wear some of the best helmets around. I wear the same Specialized S-Works Prevail helmet that many pro teams wear.

Cyclists wear helmets. Good ones. No one that wears padded spandex shorts cares much about looking dorky. But of course you're not talking about cyclists but rather "people riding bikes." Their helmets look dorky because they aren't willing to pay more than $29 for a brain bucket at Target. Of course they end up looking like the great Gazoo... because the only way to make a cheap helmet that actually protects your noggin is to make it big and dorky and uncomfortable and hot.

[/hijack]

 

[JohnnyC]

I'd buy a bicycle helmet if it made me look like The Great Gazoo. But like, legit look like him. It should be comically large.

 

[descent]

I've written about ski helmets as the perfect example of a disruptive innovation in the past. Not only did sales of ski helmets take off... but the wide availability and acceptance of helmets actually helped increase the popularity of skiing. Especially among families with young kids. ...

Interesting technology, slow uptake. Thank you for sharing your scholarship.

I used to live a short distance from Heavenly. The sprainings and maimings were considered just part of the inherent risk.

Sonny Bono was allegedly stoned on painkillers when he met his fate. Even though his celebrity highlighted the nature of the risk, helmets for skiers still sat on shelves, perhaps because most skiers saw themselves as not subject to that risk (no addiction to pills).

I had a roommate who was a 80-day-a-year snowboarder. He mocked my Petzl rock climbing helmets. "Helmets look dorky. Helmets are for dorks."

Eleven years after Sonny went off piste, Natasha Richardson took a hard fall on a bunny hill. Pictures of Liam Neeson in shock hugging their children were too much for me to look at. I had to close each tab when I saw one.

But helmets started selling.