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Eric Griffin edited this page Jul 26, 2026 · 1 revision

Safety

Submersion's safety suite is four independent tools that pick up where the dive itself leaves off:

Tool Answers
Post-dive safety review What happened on that profile that is worth noticing?
Flying after diving When is it safe to get on a plane?
Emergency card Who do I call, right now, with no signal?
Near-miss log What almost went wrong, and what would help next time?

They share one design rule: observe, don't scold. Findings are worded neutrally, drawn in the same colors as the rest of the app rather than alarm red, and every one of them can be dismissed. Nothing here grades you, and nothing is sent anywhere.

None of this is medical or decompression advice. The review describes a dive you have already done; the no-fly countdown reproduces published guideline intervals, not a physiological model of your body. Your dive computer, your training, and a diving physician outrank all of it.

Post-Dive Safety Review

When a dive has a recorded depth profile, Submersion replays it through the same Bühlmann engine used elsewhere in the app and notes anything the rules flag. The result is a short, quiet list on the dive — not a score.

What it looks at

Rule Flags Severity
Rapid ascents Ascent faster than 9 m/min (caution) or 12 m/min (significant) Caution / Significant
Missed or shortened deco stops Depth shallower than the required ceiling while under a decompression obligation Significant
Omitted safety stops The recommended stop was skipped or cut short on a non-deco dive deeper than 10 m Caution over 25 m, otherwise informational
Sawtooth profiles Three or more repeated up-and-down depth changes of at least 3 m Caution
High surfacing gradient factor Surfaced above your own configured GF-high Informational

Each finding records when in the dive it happened and by how much, so the list reads like "Ascent exceeded 11 m/min for 40 s" rather than a bare label. Short blips are filtered out as sample noise, and the shortfalls are measured against a small tolerance, so ordinary depth wobble does not produce findings.

The thresholds are fixed on purpose. The rapid-ascent rule uses 9 and 12 m/min regardless of the ascent-rate alarm you configured for the profile chart. If findings tracked your alarm settings, changing a preference would silently rewrite the history of dives you had already reviewed.

Where findings appear

  • On the dive — a Safety review section in dive detail, listing each observation with its time range and value.
  • In the dive list — a small dot next to dives that have observations. Hovering (or a long press) shows the count. There is no badge on dives with nothing to report.

Dismissing

Any finding can be dismissed — useful when you know the context (a free-flow ascent you had to make, a sawtooth profile that was the point of the dive). Dismissed findings are hidden behind a Show dismissed toggle and can be restored at any time. Dismissals sync to your other devices along with everything else.

Settings

Settings → Safety controls the review:

  • Post-dive safety review — the master switch.
  • Rules — turn individual rules on or off. Visibility is applied when findings are displayed, so turning a rule back on immediately reveals the findings it already produced rather than requiring a re-analysis.
  • Analyze all dives — sweeps your logbook and analyzes every dive with a profile that has not been reviewed yet, with a progress bar. Already-analyzed dives are skipped cheaply. If a dive cannot be analyzed (a corrupt profile, for instance), the sweep continues and reports how many were skipped.
Reviews are computed on first view. You do not have to run anything: opening a dive analyzes it if needed and stores the result. Use Analyze all dives when you want the whole logbook done at once — for example right after importing years of dives.

Honest re-grading

Each stored review records the version of the rules that produced it. When the rules or thresholds change in a future release, older reviews are recomputed the next time you look at them rather than being left to quietly disagree with the current engine. What you see always reflects today's rules.

Dives without a profile

The review needs a recorded profile — it is analysis of a depth-versus-time series, not of your logged max depth and duration. Manually entered dives with no profile simply have no review section.

Note

Altitude: if a dive site records an altitude but the dive itself does not, dive detail shows a note explaining that the decompression analysis assumed sea level. Set the dive's altitude to have the analysis — and therefore the review — account for it.

Flying After Diving

Submersion tracks a no-fly countdown from your most recent dives, using the published DAN/UHMS guideline intervals.

The intervals

Your last 48 hours of dives are classified into one of three cases, and the matching interval is counted from the end of the most recent dive:

Your last dives Standard Strict
A single no-decompression dive 12 h 18 h
Repetitive dives 18 h 24 h
Any dive with a decompression obligation 24 h 48 h

Choose between Standard and Strict in Settings → Safety → Flying after diving. Strict is the more conservative reading of the same guidance — sensible if you are older, dehydrated, cold, tired, or simply prefer margin.

Where it appears

  • Planning → Flying after diving — the full readout: time remaining, the exact clock time you are clear, which case applied, and the guideline behind it. The countdown ticks while the page is open.
  • Dashboard — an optional home chip showing either the remaining time or No-fly 0:00 when you are clear. Toggle it under Home appearance settings.
This is a guideline clock, not a tissue model. Submersion deliberately does not compute no-fly time from the decompression engine, because no diving medical body endorses model-derived flying times. It is also not a substitute for the no-fly time your dive computer shows — if the two disagree, take the longer one.

Emergency Card

A single screen with everything you would need in an emergency, built entirely from data already on your device. No network, no location permission, no sign-in — it works on a boat with no signal, which is the only condition that matters.

Open it from the dashboard quick actions (Emergency card) or Settings → Diver Profile → Emergency card.

What it shows

  1. The diver emergency hotline for your region, as a one-tap call. This is the primary action on purpose: the hotline coordinates evacuation and chamber referral, which is a decision you should not be making yourself.
  2. Local emergency services number for the same region.
  3. Your medical summary — blood type, allergies, medications — from your diver profile.
  4. Emergency contacts and dive insurance policy details.
  5. Hyperbaric chambers, nearest first, each with its contact details and the date its details were last verified.

How your region is chosen

The card uses the country of your most recent dive's site. You can override this in settings — useful the day before you travel. If neither is known, it falls back to the worldwide hotline and says so.

Chambers

Submersion bundles a starter chamber directory that ships with the app, so it is available offline from first launch. On top of that you can:

  • Add a chamber you know about locally.
  • Hide a bundled entry that is wrong or no longer operating (with an undo).
Verify before you rely on it. Chamber availability changes constantly — facilities close, staffing varies, and a chamber listed as operating may not be able to take you. Every entry carries a "verified" date so you can see how fresh it is. Always call the diver emergency hotline first; they know which chamber is actually accepting patients tonight.
Fill in your medical details, contacts and insurance under Settings → Diver Profile. The card tells you when there is nothing to show — and the day you need it is not the day to discover it is empty.

Near-Miss Log

A private log for the dives where something almost went wrong. Aviation has had non-punitive incident reporting for decades, and it works for the same reason it would work here: patterns are only visible if the small things get written down.

Open it from Settings → Manage → Near-miss log, or from a dive's overflow menu (Log near-miss) to link the report to that dive.

What a report holds

Field Notes
When it happened Defaults to today; a near-miss need not be tied to a logged dive
Category Buoyancy, gas supply, equipment, buddy separation, marine life, boat/surface, medical, planning, other
Severity Minor, moderate, serious — your own judgment
What happened The narrative. Just the facts, in your own words
What contributed Optional — conditions, fatigue, time pressure, an unfamiliar rig
What would help next time Optional — the part that actually changes behavior

Reports linked to a dive show as a quiet chip on that dive's detail page. If you later delete the dive, the report survives and simply loses the link — deleting a dive should never destroy the lesson.

Privacy is the point. Near-miss reports sync between your own devices and are included in your backups, but they are never included in exports or shared logbook pages. A log you might have to show someone is a log you will not write honestly.

Where Everything Lives

Feature Path
Safety review settings, rules, backfill Settings → Safety
No-fly preset Settings → Safety → Flying after diving
No-fly countdown Planning → Flying after diving, plus an optional dashboard chip
Findings for one dive Dive detail → Safety review
Emergency card Dashboard quick actions, or Settings → Diver Profile → Emergency card
Medical details, contacts, insurance Settings → Diver Profile
Near-miss log Settings → Manage → Near-miss log, or a dive's overflow menu

What the Suite Does Not Do

  • It is not real-time. Nothing here runs during a dive. Your computer is the instrument you dive; this is what you look at afterwards.
  • It does not judge. There is no safety score, no streak, no comparison to other divers, and nothing leaves your devices.
  • It does not replace training. A rule can tell you an ascent was fast; only training and honest reflection tell you why it happened.

See also

Getting Started

Logging Your Dives

Your Dive World

Diver & Gear

Insights & Planning

Setup & Data

Reference

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