Portable Recompression Chambers in Diving?

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CuriousRambler

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I was thinking the other day and I remember seeing a documentary on extreme mountaineering, like K2 and Everest level climbing. It was a long time ago, and a long time before I was into diving, so I don't remember how related the ailments the climbers were getting would be to DCS, but some of the climbers would come down with some type of high-altitude sickness. Again, I don't remember details AT ALL, but as part of their treatment they would put them into what was essentially a nylon recompression bag that they would inflate to increase the pressure/decrease the altitude effects on the body.

Obviously something like that wouldn't be capable of the extreme pressures to take a bent diver down to anything beyond a couple atmospheres, but if a diver came up bent from a dive, even recompressing the diver to 50 feet while you waited on a helicopter or rushed them to a real chamber would give them that much better odds of not sustaining any permanent injuries, wouldn't it? Does the dive industry already have some form of similar technology, or am I stumbling onto a possibly lucrative idea?
 
Does the dive industry already have some form of similar technology...
Yep, there are a couple of different versions, one of which collapses into a little stack about 3' in diameter & about a foot high.
The Navy even has a "portable" recompression chamber.
Someone will chime in fairly soon with a link to a website.
 
Yes I heard of them from an instructor last week so they exist for scuba diving. He got bent in Guam after rescuing another diver, he said they got a helicopter out to the boat in 8 mins with a portable recompression chamber on it, and then he was flown to a hospital were they attached the portable chamber to a larger chamber so he didn't have to leave it at all. I think it was a Navy one... but do not know what it is called to look for the type, google returns a lot of results for 'portable recompression chamber' though.
 
Yeah, I did a google search and a lot of the "recompression chambers" or "hyperbaric chambers" are rated to like 7psi for oxygen therapy or something, not what I was thinking about..
 
I recently did a tour of the military dive facilities here on the pacific coast, they had a portable chamber there. Well actually they had a few ranging in sizes from one that was built into a shipping container to a smaller one on wheels that could be carted around. It was a L shape and just bug enough to have a patient lying down and an attendant sitting up. While it wasn't small when compared to a nylon sack it was not something for the claustrophobic. The cool thing was that it could be hooked up to any decompression chamber with a NATO locking ring (hooray for standardization!) so once you made it to a proper chamber you wouldn't have to be decompressed and then recompressed again. Saspotato - Maybe this is something similar to what the instructor you talked to last week got to ride in.
 
Google GSE (Giunio Santi Engineering) Flexidec(k?). They're an Italian company that make portable chambers good to 165'.
 
Well damn...There goes my million dollar idea..I'm assuming they're ridiculously expensive, and cost is the prohibiting factor..But about what does one typically run, anyone have an idea? I'm thinking if I win the lottery maybe I'll keep one in my car so I can throw on my scuba gear and trick myself into thinking I'm diving every time I remember I'm stuck in a desert :wink:
 
http://www.sub-find.com/chambers.htm

Not available in Canada. Figures.
Strange, considering that they are located in British Columbia. Maybe it's because of restrictions on selling "medical equipment", since the most common use of chambers is for medical treatments such as hypberbaric oxygen treatments to assist the healing of wounds of diabetics.
 
https://www.shearwater.com/products/perdix-ai/

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