Diveheart
THERAPEUTIC SCUBA WILL GO DEEPER WITH DIVEHEART’S NEWEST POOL
By Lake County Partners, Date: February 1, 2024
Imagine escaping your wheelchair and standing upright. Diveheart, a non-profit organization based in Downers Grove, Illinois, has been helping individuals with disabilities including physical and developmental disabilities, vision and hearing impairments, amputations, traumatic brain injuries, autism, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, chronic pain and more, do exactly that since 2001.
Diveheart provides unique adaptive scuba and scuba therapy programs that allow individuals with physical and/or cognitive disabilities to expand their mobility through the experience of being underwater in zero gravity.
Diveheart’s programs have benefitted children, veterans, and countless others and helped to revolutionize water rehabilitation. Now, the charity that introduced and expanded adaptive scuba around the world is building the world’s deepest warm water therapy pool – and with the help of Lake County Partners, the organization has chosen a site in Lake County, Illinois, for the facility because the location will benefit from the area’s immense life science and healthcare talent. Learn more about the proposed deep pool in this new video.
After completing a preliminary facility design, securing the second of two patents on the deep pool design, and finalizing a capital raise feasibility assessment, Diveheard recently revealed the proposed pool’s cutting-edge design and kicked off a major fundraising campaign.
“There are many great types of therapy, but in scuba diving we have the franchise on zero gravity,” said Diveheart Executive Director Tinamarie Hernandez. “It’s thrilling to help get someone out of their wheelchair and standing up underwater for the first time since their injury, or maybe for the first time in their lives,” she added.
Diveheart’s proposed deep pool will provide a way to scale up and help more people enjoy the physical health benefits of underwater zero gravity in a confined and safe warm water environment. The pool will be a worldwide destination for research, rehabilitation, education, and training, and it will provide vocational opportunities as well. The 130 ft. depth of the pool is important because it allows Diveheart to replicate the benefits of deep open water diving without the unknowns of weather, water movement, and other factors that limit opportunities for research and rehabilitation.
Currently, the world’s deepest recreational dive pool, at 200 feet, is located in Dubai, but no existing deep pool anywhere in the world is functional for adaptive scuba and scuba therapy, says Jim Elliott, Diveheart’s founder and president. However, the pool that Diveheart plans to build will meet this important need.
The Diveheart team has focused on the medical and therapeutic benefits of scuba therapy since the organization’s founding over 23 years ago, and its experts have conducted international adaptive scuba symposiums and presented to medical groups around the world. In 2023, Diveheart presented to physicians from the Mayo Clinic on the benefits of scuba therapy, and the team will return for an encore presentation at another Mayo Clinic conference this spring.
Prior to the engagement, Diveheart will kick off its deep pool project with a campaign launch event in Deerfield in mid-February to demonstrate how it would revolutionize adaptive scuba rehabilitation and make it accessible to a wider community. Learn more about the project and how your donation can make a difference here.