Diving Into Research of Biomedical Engineering in Scuba Diving.

The physiologic response of the human body to different environments is a complex phenomenon to ensure survival. Immersion and compressed gas diving, together, trigger a set of responses. Monitoring those responses in real time may increase our understanding of them and help us to develop safety procedures and equipment. This review outlines diving physiology and diseases and identifies physiological parameters worthy of monitoring. Subsequently, we have investigated technological approaches matched to those in order to evaluated their capability for underwater application. We focused on wearable biomedical monitoring technologies, or those which could be transformed to wearables. We have also reviewed current safety devices, including dive computers and their underlying decompression models and algorithms. The review outlines the necessity for biomedical monitoring in scuba diving and should encourage research and development of new methods to increase diving safety.

Wearable real-time ecg monitoring with emergency alert system for scuba diving.

Medical diagnosis is the first level for recognition and treatment of diseases. To realize fast diagnosis, we propose a concept of a basic framework for the underwater monitoring of a diver's ECG signal, including an alert system that warns the diver of predefined medical emergency situations. The framework contains QRS detection, heart rate calculation and an alert system. After performing a predefined study protocol, the algorithm's accuracy was evaluated with 10 subjects in a dry environment and with 5 subjects in an underwater environment. The results showed that, in 3 out of 5 dives as well as in dry environment, data transmission remained stable. In these cases, the subjects were able to trigger the alert system. The evaluated data showed a clear ECG signal with a QRS detection accuracy of 90 %. Thus, the proposed framework has the potential to detect and to warn of health risks. Further developments of this sample concept can imply an extension for monitoring different biomedical parameters.