Development design of wrist-mounted dive computer for marine leisure activities

Abstract

Divers conventionally use underwater notepad or flash to communicate each other in the water. For safe marine leisure activities, touchscreen based intuitive means of communications such as drawing and writing are needed to be integrated into the conventional dive computers. In this paper, we propose a wrist-mounted dive computer, so called DiverPAD, for underwater drawing and writing. For the framework design of proposed DiverPAD, firmware, communication protocol, user interface (UI), and underwater touchscreen functions are designed and integrated on DiverPAD. As a key feature, we deployed an electrical insulator based capacitive touchscreen which enables divers to perform underwater drawing and writing for clear and immediate information delivery in the water.