The device that could save your life?

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Solotor

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As a solo diver you would ideally have analysed all dangers of a given dive and taken appropriate actions to mitigate these risks. This includes being in perfect physical and mental state on the day of your dive, such that you would be able to quickly and unambiguously notice if your body tells you that something is wrong.

Still, the one thing you would not have control over is if you became unconscious or otherwise incapacitated (unlikely, I know, but it has happened, right?).

What if you had a device that automatically inflated your BCD if you went unconscious, say you failed to push a button every 30 seconds to confirm to the device that you are still with us.

Clearly there are a lots of problems with this: Being bent at the surface, inhaling water, bumping into boats, etc. I can see many ways that this device would simply bring an otherwise dead body to surface.

But still, what are your thoughts on this? Could such a device provide a real benefit?
 
There is one giant glaring condition you failed to mention.... As this device sends divers to the surface just about all of them will have blown up their lungs. Unconscious and bent on the surface? Nope. They would be dead on the surface. Of course the other problem is the device will likely kill many people who were distracted or simply forgot to hit the damn button every thirty seconds. An audible reminder would so annoying no one would use it. There is no way in hell I would allow a device to automatically send me to the surface. Too risky.
 
Unconscious and brought to the surface rapidly would mean , IMHO, fast expansion of the lungs and death:stirpot:
 
Unconscious diver would also tend to drop his / her jaw & release the mouthbit. Then what? Wearing gag strap?

If you are known to pass out from time to time (or snoozing) don’t pick diving as a hobby.
 
Yeah, you could end up with a fatal injury from an uncontrolled ascent. But that objection sort of misses the point. If I was in that situation, I would FAR prefer to be blown to the surface than left unconscious at depth, since I would be certainly dead in the latter scenario and possibly dead in the former. Of course, the main concern would be the thing going off on it's own. We train for that eventuality right now, since regular scuba gear can fail with an uncontrolled inflation of the BC, and we need to know how to disconnect the inflator hose. There was a tragic death on the Andrea Doria this year which is thought to have been caused by that problem.

The more important problem with the OP's idea is this. While loss of consciousness is a real concern in rebreather diving (and there are some steps that are sometimes taken to address that possibility), an open circuit diver is no more likely to lose consciousness than anyone else doing any other activity.

Before working on an engineering solution to that problem, if spontaneous loss of consciousness happened often enough for it to be statistically significant, then we should work on a gadget that will safely pull a car off the road and stop it in case the driver loses consciousness. This is FAR more of a problem, since (1) there are approximately 100 times as many drivers as divers, and (2) a driver losing consciousness can kill other people as well as themselves...
 
As a solo diver you would ideally have analyzed all dangers of a given dive and taken appropriate actions to mitigate these risks. This includes being in perfect physical and mental state on the day of your dive, such that you would be able to quickly and unambiguously notice if your body tells you that something is wrong.

Still, the one thing you would not have control over is if you became unconscious or otherwise incapacitated (unlikely, I know, but it has happened, right?).

What if you had a device that automatically inflated your BCD if you went unconscious, say you failed to push a button every 30 seconds to conform to the device that you are still with us.

Clearly, there are a lot of problems with this: Being bent at the surface, inhaling water, bumping into boats, etc. I can see many ways that this device would simply bring an otherwise dead body to surface.

But still, what are your thoughts on this? Could such a device provide a real benefit?
I forget what it's called but there is at least one such product already in existence. Maybe two. Deathtraps in my opinion. Use scubaboard's search feature as the've been discussed ad nauseum on this site.

Unless this is just advertising for one of those existing products then I suggest you do more research before putting money into developing something that already exists and running afoul of existing patents.
 
The only practical way I could see such a device working (and being marketable to a high risk demographic) is if the device monitored for a pulse. Since it seems the majority of diving incidents appear to be cardiovascular in nature, perhaps if the device no longer detected a pulse for x amount of seconds, then an alarm would go off requiring manual intervention before x amount of time has passed and then it sends you to the surface for possible recovery. I would still be leery of having any device that could automatically send me to the surface.

ETA... Of course, if solo, the unconscious diver would probably end up face down on the surface anyway so really, what's the point?

The bottom line, don't lose consciousness while diving.
 
I think it would need some artificial intelligence for the device which should ideally be based on a dive computer with air integration. You can define parameters whereby the computer will take over control of buoyancy (both inflating and deflating the BCD) to bring a diver safely to the surface (above MOD/below ceiling). It would also need a manual override.
 
Here's a thread I mentioned that discusses one such existing device:

Thread: DiverGuard looks for skeptics bloggers/reporters
Product: DiverGuard

Also, there is the FSDS-100 made by Watergill in 1975 (the year I was born!). Google: watergill fsds-100 - Google Search:

The watergill did pretty much the same thing except it was purely mechanical (no electronics). Somewhat telling that this product is no longer available.
 
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I've got an idea.. It would only be something the wealthy would buy and you've got a problem with lead pollution that would need to be solved.. What about a device that automatically ditches all your lead once you hit the surface. Many fatalities involve someone who got to the surface but couldn't stay there. Somtimes due to equipment failure. Sometimes due to judgement failure.
 
https://www.shearwater.com/products/swift/

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