Project Dive Exploration

DAN Southern Africa members can participate in this DAN America Project

Project Dive Exploration (PDE) is the most extensive study of recreational diving ever conducted. With affiliate programs in Europe and Southeast Asia, DAN's goal is to record more than one million dive profiles to produce statistically accurate analyses of dive profiles, diver characteristics, and diver behaviour.

Project Dive Exploration is a prospective observational study of the demographics, medical history, depth-time exposure, and medical outcome of a sample of the recreational diving population. PDE seeks to estimate the incidence of decompression sickness (DCS) in population subgroups and to investigate the relationship of DCS probability to depth-time profile, dive and diver characteristics. PDE also provides an injury-free control population for comparison with DAN’s injury and fatality populations to identify possible risk factors associated with injury and death.

The diving accident data that DAN has collected since 1987 provides useful information about decompression injuries and their treatment, but is lacking in information about the depth-time profiles that caused these injuries and has no information about safe dives. Without this information, there can be no understanding of the critical relationships among diver demographics, dive conditions, dive profiles, diving injuries, and recompression therapy effectiveness. Project Dive Exploration was designed to meet these needs.

If you would like to get involved Contact Us.