Generating Textual Reports of Scuba Dive Computer Data                                                        Funded by the Nuffield Foundation from May 2004 to December 2006

Recreational SCUBA ('self-contained underwater breathing apparatus') diving is the most popular form of underwater sports - every year one million new divers get certified by PADI (Professional Association of Diving Instructors).

SCUBA divers are vulnerable to decompression illness, a term often used to describe any disease caused by a reduction in ambient pressure. Decompression sickness, more popluarly known as 'the bends' is one such illness. The most widely accepted theory for explaining 'the bends' is 'the nitrogen bubble theory'. According to this theory, because of the extra pressure exerted by water (in addition to the atmospheric pressure) divers' lungs breathe (a mixture of oxygen and nitrogen) from the Scuba air cylinder under increased ambient pressure. As a result more nitrogen gets dissolved in the body tissues. The dissolved nitrogen bubbles through the body when the divers rapidly ascend to the surface just like a fizzy drink bubbles when the cork is rapidly opened (pressure released). These nitrogen bubbles clog at joints causing 'the bends'.

SCUBA divers carry out decompression stops while ascending to the surface to allow their bodies to naturally get rid of the unwanted nitrogen. Divers can also be decompressed in decompression chambers to remove excess Nitrogen. Over the years dive tables have been used to provide guideline information about required decompression times during the ascent of a dive and also about required rest times between two successive dives. When used faithfully these tables help in planning safe dives to avoid 'the bends'.

One of the modern items of diving gear is a dive computer. A dive computer is a sports gadget that is worn on the divers' wrist (looks more like a wrist watch than a computer) to continually monitor their dives. A dive computer continuously records data such as depth and ambient temperature about the dive. It can also generate a dive table on the fly and compare the recorded data against the table data to inform divers about required decompression stops. They therefore ensure that divers are continually informed to perform safe dives.

Dive computers record dive logs which contain time series of dive depth and tissue saturation. These data sets can be useful to

In this project we develop techniques to produce textual (English) reports of dive data recorded by dive computers. The computer generated report will contain the following information

Yaji Sripada

 

Feng Gao

 

  1. Sripada S and Gao F (2007) Linguistic Interpretations of Scuba Dive Computer Data. To appear in Proceedings of 11th International Conference on Information Visualization.
  2. Sripada S and Gao F (2007) Summarizing Dive Computer Data: A Case Study in Integrating Textual and Graphical Presentations of Numerical Data. In Proceedings of Workshop on Multimodal Output Generation. CTIT Proceedings of the Workshop on Multimodal Output Generation, 2007, 149-157. pdf
  3. Ramon Bertran Monfort (2005) ScubaWorkBench: A Workbench for Generating Textual Descriptions of Scuba Dive Profile Data. BSc Honours project report. pdf
  4. Robothom IJ, Cowan CJA, Campbell ETD, Eddie L, Foster H and Wang L (2006) EchoBeach: A System for Generating Blogs from Dive Logs. BSc Level 3 group project report. pdf

Related Projects

Diving Medicine

Diving Clubs

For more information contact Yaji Sripada.