"CADDY - Cognitive Autonomous Diving Buddy" is an FP7 project that that is devoted to developing a cognitive underwater robotic system that will help divers during their activities in this hazardous environment. The envisioned resulting system will play a threefold role similar to those that a human buddy diver should have: buddy "observer", buddy "slave", and buddy "guide". During the second year of the project, validation trials were organized in Croatia with the purpose of testing all developed algorithms that will enable the three roles of the CADDY system. The trials were structured in five experiments. This paper is devoted to providing a concise overview of the conducted experiments and major results.

Background: The physiological and pathophysiological mechanisms that govern diving, both self-contained underwater breathing apparatus (SCUBA) and breath-hold diving (BH-diving), are in large part well known, even if there are still many unknown aspects, in particular about cell metabolism during BH-diving. The scope of this study was to investigate changes in glycemia, insulinemia, and the catecholamine response to BH-diving, to better understand if the insulin-stimulated glucose uptake mechanism is involved in cellular metabolism in this sport. Methods: Twenty male experienced healthy breath-hold divers were studied. Anthropometric information was obtained. Glycemia, insulinemia, and catecholamine response were investigated before and after the series of BH-diving. Results

Divers Alert Network Europe has created a database with a large amount of dive-related data that has been collected since 1993 within the scope of the Diving Safety Laboratory citizen science project. The main objectives of this study are the grouping divers by their health information and revealing significant differences in diving parameters using data mining techniques. Due to the methodology of the project, data cleaning was performed before applying clustering methods in order to eliminate potential mistakes resulting from inaccuracies and missing information. Despite the fact that 63% of the data were lost during the cleaning phase, the remaining 1,169 "clean" diver data enabled meaningful clustering using the "two-step" method. Experienced male divers without any health problems are in Cluster 1.

Commercial saturation diving involves divers living and working in an enclosed atmosphere with elevated partial pressure of oxygen (ppO2) for weeks. The divers must acclimatize to these conditions during compression, and for up to 28 days until decompression is completed. During decompression, the ppO2 and ambient pressure are gradually decreased; then the divers must acclimatize again to breathing normal air in atmospheric pressure when they arrive at surface. We investigated 51 saturation divers’ subjective evaluation of the saturation and post-decompression phase via questionnaires and individual interviews.

Hyperbaric oxygen therapy, apart from some acute and very specialized indications regarding the treatment of decompression disorders and arterial air/gas embolism, is generally aimed at treating serious and complex disorders, generally reluctant to standard treatment and requires prolonged and reiterated hospitalization/rehabilitation periods as well as elevated technical, social and human costs.