IoT: The Future of Seafarer Safety

Faced with the COVID-19 crisis, shipping companies have one business imperative: maintaining business continuity.

IoT, implemented in a plug-and-play manner, can be instrumental in ensuring business continuity and minimizing economic damage by ensuring employee safety and security, improving liquidity, and lowering short-term costs.

Seafarer Safety

Ensuring seafarers’ safety and security is the most important lever to safeguard operations. The situation of a master recently diverting a Singapore bound Aframax to India citing mental strain from prolonged working hours could have probably been foreseen and prevented by telemedicine and videoconferencing applications.

IoT, Business Continuity, and the Connected Ship

Sensor information would have highlighted under-maintained areas or unusual work patterns due to fatigue acting as a lead indicator.

Imagine a world where crewing performance is optimized like [the performance of] competitive athletes – Elizabeth Jackson, KVH

Regular videoconferencing had supported a bond and relationship between ship and shore, whilst telehealth with its capacity to contribute to data sets that can identify trends, would have enabled a professional analysis, potentially preventing this situation to unfold, and maintaining business continuity.

The Human Element

Although IoT is focused on machine-to-machine communication, it can make a great positive impact on the people using it – both from an employers’ and an employee’s perspective. At any given time, 1.5 million seafarers are operating around 55,000 merchant vessels across the globe. Of these seafarers, around seven percent each year will be evacuated from the vessel on which they are working due to ill health. The annual cost to the industry of diversions and helicopter evacuations is $760m, almost a quarter of which are ultimately unnecessary.

Want to learn more about maritime IoT solutions?

KVH Watch is a versatile suite of IoT tools optimized for use at sea via satellite to meet your diverse IoT needs.

Key benefits for your crew:

• Videoconferencing
• Ability to run telemedicine applications
• ROI by preventing crew fatigue or vessel diversion

Superior connectivity sustains business continuity and unlocks the real-time benefits of IoT at sea – discover KVH Watch.

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Learn more about the benefits of IoT for the maritime industry with KVH’s free webinar: Maritime IoT – Enabling Disruptive Service Models