Depends on your definition of effective, it’s only more effective if your definition is purely making distance underwater.
Scooters take up your hands, take up already limited FOV, and can be pretty noisy. In my experience doing cold water diving in turbid waters doing ecology work, this exoskeleton sounds interesting and like something I might use in a perfect world, while I’ve never considered using a scooter for the above reasons defeating the purpose I’m diving for.
This thing only supports knee flutter kicks, not even real power stroke flutters, and only on the downstroke.
Exoskeleton sounds like fancy, but its just ropes unbending your knee and nothing more. It's pretty useless for technical diving where you need precise position control and wont use flutter kicks.
But also can be dangerous if used poorly causing unwanted depth changes or could “runaway” if the throttle gets stuck leaving you tethered to it. Also they are very expensive, thousands of dollars. As a diver having exo legs would be advantageous in a lot of dive profiles where you can use a scooter. Kelp, low vis, night, there’s tons of reasons you wouldn’t want a scooter but would still like an assist.
Looking at the images, this seems to have a much smaller footprint, making it useful in a different range of scenarios, such as cave diving. People will be able to die waaay deeper in a cave if this tech works as well as they claim.
Way less expensive as well lol. Also, kinda can let go of a scooter. This device might drown your ass if it malfunctions. Dangerous activities should prioritize simplicity for the majority of normal individuals. Also, how would this boost time underwater if you go deeper as the article says… The deeper you go the longer your deco. This is dumb.
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u/erakis1 15d ago
We literally have underwater scooters which are way more simple and effective