The South Korean province of Jeju is well-known for a culture of women known as the “haenyeo.” They are the breadwinners in their communities who make a living free diving to harvest seafood.   

The culture has been around for hundreds of years and was named to UNESCO’s “List Of The Intangible Cultural Heritage Of Humanity” in 2016.  

But the culture is dying out as the core population is aging and fewer younger women are opting for the physically demanding, traditional lifestyle given the many more modern opportunities to make a living.   

And let’s face it: diving all day to depths of 20 meters or more, holding your breath for three minutes at a time while collecting conches, abalone and other fruits of the sea, has got to be pretty taxing. Try doing that all day long for 40 years.  

And as the group ages, more fatal accidents (usually heart-related) have occurred.   

That’s where ad agency Cheil enters the picture. The agency and the Jeju Institute of Korean Medicine have taken the wraps off a safety system they jointly developed dubbed the Haenyeo Safe Buddy app for smart watches. 

The app monitors the heart rates of divers in real time, analyzing heartrate changes, and quickly detecting danger signals. In an emergency, it sends a warning alarm to the affected diver and to the other haenyeo divers within a 1-kilometer radius. This allows them to initiate rescue efforts before the arrival of emergency responders from nearby villages.    

A button on the app also transmits an alert to the Jeju emergency response center triggering first-responder efforts.    

The Haenyeo began using the app in March and currently 300 are equipped with it. Over the past ten months, there have been no fatalities reported among the monitored divers.  

The hope is the app will help keep the haenyeo divers safe as they harvest their underwater treasures for generations to come.  

I’m guessing the app itself may harvest some treasure of its own at the Cannes ad festival in June.