Psycho-physiological tele-monitoring of human operators in commercial diving: The Life Support System in the SUONO project

Sea-diving operations for monitoring or intervention are carried out by highly-specialized divers called Certified Commercial Divers (CCD). CCDs operate under highly demanding working conditions in extreme and hazardous environments. Every day consists of an 8 hours' shift. To avoid decompression problems the remaining 16 hours are spent in a hyperbaric environment located aboard the surface vessel or on the platform. These operating conditions require the design of a technologically-advanced device for tele-monitoring, to maximize CCDs' safety. Here we describe a proposal for monitoring and supporting CCDs during operations. We design a dedicated Life Support System (LSS), that captures real-time, vital (heart rate, respiratory rate, accelerometry, etc) and stress-related (heart-rate variability) signals from operators to transmit them to dedicated servers via telematic protocols. LSS is equipped with protocols for tele-medicine/tele-consultation. Our system is being developed within the research project SUONO (Safe Underwater OperatioNs in Oceans).