Maritime Telemedicine: Design and Development of an Advanced Healthcare System Called Marine Doctor

Abstract

Background: The availability of better healthcare services is critical for onboard seafarers. The development of expert systems can help ships with limited medical facilities, which allow the shipside doctors to properly refer symptoms to remote doctors. This allows clinicians to make a correct diagnosis from there, which leads to proper treatment. A software named Marine Doctor (M Doc) has been developed by incorporating computing technologies to address this objective. Methods: With the help of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) this application can support the provision of appropriate medical assistance to seafarers. The system was developed with Python Tkinter (frontend) and PHP (backend) languages. MySQL was used as a server database. Results: Seafarers can use M Doc to benefit from medical advice that can reduce complications due to misdiagnosis and help doctors to make better-informed decisions. By automatically collecting appropriate sequences of symptoms, doctors will be able to generate proper information for referral of patient symptoms and subsequent advice based on the data. Conclusions: Technology that supports experts on board ships in better interacting with Telemedical Maritime Assistance Services (TMAS) could define the future of medical assistance at sea.