A novel wearable apnea dive computer for continuous plethysmographic monitoring of oxygen saturation and heart rate

(Kuch B, Koss B, Dujic Z, Buttazzo G, Sieber A. A novel wearable apnea dive computer for continuous plethysmographic monitoring of oxygen saturation and heart rate. Diving and Hyperbaric Medicine. 2010;40(1):34-40.) We describe the development of a novel, wrist-mounted apnea dive computer. The device is able to measure and display transcutaneous oxygen saturation, heart rate, plethysmographic pulse waveform, depth, time and temperature during breath-hold dives. All measurements are stored in an external memory chip. The data-processing software reads from the chip and writes the processed data into a comma-separated-values file that can be analysed by applications such as Microsoft Excel (TM) or Open Office (TM). The housing is waterproof and pressure-resistant to more than 2.026 MPa (20 bar) (breath-hold divers have already exceeded 200 metres' sea water depth). It is compact, lightweight, has low power requirements and is easy to use.