Background

Boat Terrorist-planted underwater improvised explosive devices and sea and limpet mines represent some of the most significant security threats to U.S. military and commercial ships, ports, waterways and other maritime assets. U.S. Joint Explosive Ordnance and Disposal (EOD) and Public Safety divers serve as the first line of defense against this type weaponry. The process by which they address this threat is very complicated and dangerous. Among other things, they must determine the location and identity of the weapon, asses the magnitude of the potential explosion, and employ tactics, techniques and procedures to disarm and dispose it. Team leaders must also quickly assess the abilities of their assembled dive teams, including individual team member training and preparedness. To satisfy these important needs, the Office of Naval Research tasked MobilVox to develop the Diver Situational Awareness System (DSAS). The DSAS is a portable computer diving tool that is both rugged and water-proof. It is intended to help divers perform their critically important missions more efficiently, effectively and safely. The tool's computer application is compatible with any rugged tablet PC and provides diving teams with real-time access to the technical, procedural and mission oriented information needed on diving missions.

This diving tool has an easy-to-use touch screen interface containing many features such as safety checklists, dive logs, underwater search plans, tactics, techniques and procedures, dive tables, diving calculators, countermeasure procedures, underwater safe blast distance calculators, a web camera with exportable images, GIS satellite imagery and GPS integration among many other mission critical functions. For ease of use, all of these features can be accessed and controlled through the voice command feature that allows for text to speech and voice recognition functions.

In addition to enhancing the capabilities of military EOD divers during diving missions, this handy state-of-the-art computer tool can be used in the classroom and during training exercises by all Federal, State and local maritime security diving personnel.

For more information on the Diver Situational Awareness System, please contact us.

About DSAS

The Diver Situational Awareness System (DSAS) is a desktop application intended to provide EOD and Public Safety Divers (PSD) with the tools and mission-critical information they need in order to minimize safety risks and make their jobs easier and more efficient. DSAS supports three different mission types: Men

Once a mission is created, the software displays the mission tasks organized into the five mission phases: Tasking, Arrival, Search, Prosecution and Post-Ops. Each mission phase contains a checklist of tasks for that mission phase. The checklists include critical mission procedures and forms which differ with the mission type. These checklists are made available so mission progress can be easily tracked in an organized and efficient manner. Each mission can be saved, modified or discarded. Missions are saved to a database and can be reopened later. With the search feature, dive manuals and other documents can also be easily found and accessed on your computer. After the completion of each mission, DSAS automatically generates a post mission report.

The forms for a Hull Search mission are:

The forms for a Bottom Search mission are:

The forms for an Underwater Post-Blast Investigation are:

The steps in a mission can be modified to suit the user's preferences. Steps can be added, deleted, renamed or changed to link to a different tool.

DSAS contains several dive tables and a dive calculator:

DSAS contains ID guides:

DSAS also contains a collection of tools:

User information can be imported into the address book either directly from Microsoft Outlook or from VCF files.