Navigating the challenges in remote medical care for mariners during disasters and pandemics: integration of mHealth and drone technology.

Abstract

This article is available in open access under Creative Common Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) license, allowing to download articles and share them with others as long as they credit the authors and the publisher, but without permission to change them in any way or use them commercially. INTRODUCTION Mariners work in remote areas with limited access to medical facilities, which creates unique challenges in accessing medical care. The integration of mobile health (mHealth) and drone technology presents a promising solution that can offer remote medical consultation, monitoring, and digital intervention services to mariners. Furthermore, drones can be used to provide timely transportation of medical supplies and equipment to the ships, especially during emergencies. However, the implementation of mHealth and drone technology for mariners’ health also presents challenges, such as connectivity issues, regulations, safety, weather conditions, and privacy and security concerns related to medical data. This research work addresses the potential benefits and challenges as well as implications of integrating m-health and drone technology for mariners’ health. In the last two decades, approximately eight thousand distinct disasters and catastrophic events have been recorded. Each disaster has an immense impact on the physical, cognitive and emotional health of individuals, especially seafarers and mariners [1]. The scary and horrific situation of the disaster generally induces different kinds of infections such as hepatitis, typhoid, diarrhoea, acute respiratory infections, malaria, leptospirosis, and measles [2]. In the critical situation of the disaster (hydro-meteorological, geo-morphological, and geophysical disasters), the on-time support provided through mHealth and drone technology can surely mitigate the risk of infections and can save masses of human lives. As per prior studies, the case mortality rates (CMR) of different pandemics, H1N1, H5N1, Ebola, Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV), and severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV) strain, were 3%, 60%, 50%, 34%, and 15%, respectively. However, to date, the CMR for coronavirus disease 2029 (COVID-19) is 2.16% which is quite lower than H5N1, Ebola, MERS-CoV, and SARS-CoV [3].