Motion capture for underwater communication and diver health monitoring
SCUBA divers visit a world that is 1000 times denser than air, and that is often murky, with strong currents and other surprises. To mitigate risk divers are taught to go down in pairs, where each buddy looks out for the other. Yet many divers dive alone for a variety of reasons including buddy unavailability or accidental separation. The Diver Alert Network has reported that 86% of diving fatalities were alone when they died. For the buddy system to work well divers have developed gesture-based communications for hazard alerting, assessing each other’s wellbeing and relaying intentions. Gesture based communication is line-of-sight and works well in clean non-murky water but can be hard to achieve when the water is murky and turbulent. And it is useless if the diver is alone or separated from a buddy. In collaboration with LABUST at the University of Zagreb we are using direct motion capture of fingers in a smart glove that processes gestures and turns them into commands that can be acoustically transmitted directly to a robot or a buddy that is out of sight. The motion-capture technology can also be used in a wetsuit to monitor diver breathing and movement. In this talk we describe the technology of the motion capture sensors and how they are well suited for the ocean environment. We demonstrate the glove, and relate our experimental results. Finally we report our preliminary work using wetsuit sensors for diver condition monitoring, demonstrating motion capture as a means for improving diver safety.