Seasickness app tested aboard South African icebreaker
The app allows ship management to track and reduce motion sickness in real-time. The woman behind it hopes it will help both individual sailors and the voyages they are part of.
Have you ever been lying in the back of a ship cabin, overcome by nausea, dreading the next wave rolling in? It will not be much comfort in the moment, but in that case, you are far from the only one.
Around one third of people are highly susceptible to motion sickness while almost everyone else is susceptible in extreme conditions. And, when sailing in the icy waters of the world’s polar regions, extreme conditions are not uncommon. The winds get rough, the voyages are long, and, usually, safe harbors are many miles away.
For this reason, it makes sense that a new app designed to track and prevent seasickness was tested during a voyage of the SA Agulhas II, South Africa’s polar supply and research vessel.
The app was designed by Dr Nicole Taylor, a postdoctoral research fellow at Stellenbosch University near Cape Town. She designed it to help captains and ship management not only observe major incidents of seasickness, but to be able to prevent them.
“The aim of this is to predict motion sickness incidence on board to support tactical decision making, including weighing up different voyage route suggestions or optimal crew selection,” she said in a press release.
Measured before each meal
Symptoms of seasickness include dizziness, fatigue, nausea, vomiting, and general discomfort, and once these occur, no effective treatments exist. The best cause of action, therefore, is to prevent the sickness before it sets in.
This is the thinking behind Dr Nicole Taylor’s app, which she named Mariner 4.0. With it, crew members reported their levels of seasickness at least three times a day; before breakfast, before lunch, and before dinner. Moreover, crew members filled out a daily questionnaire that included more details, such as severity of symptoms and whether they had vomited.
With this data, Dr Nicole Taylor was able to analyze seasickness in an entirely new way, and she could do so (almost) in real-time.
“With the Mariner 4.0 system, data on motion sickness and occupant location, as well as ship motion that typically make passengers feel sick in parallel, can be measured and analyzed quickly. It also provides accurate estimates of how sick passengers feel based on how much the ship moves,” she said in the press release.
Seasickness could be planned away
Motion sickness is typically induced by low-frequency lateral and vertical motion (in the case of seasickness induced by waves). The most common theory is that the brain triggers symptoms because of a discrepancy between actual versus expected inputs: the so-called sensory conflict and neural mismatch theory.
Whatever the neurological explanation, Dr Nicole Taylor hopes that she will be able to prevent seasickness altogether. Because in her doctoral dissertation, in conjunction with the self-reported data from sailors, she also measured the movements of the SA Agulhas II.
This allowed her to compare levels of seasickness with doses of motion, and, through that, determine the level and type of motion that induced the most sickness; both in the crew as a whole and in each individual member.
This comparison, in turn, allowed her to create seasickness thresholds for each crew member; thresholds that can be used when planning trips, selecting crew, and even when designing ships.
“These thresholds can be tailored to voyage specifications, and different voyage missions, including duration of motion exposure,” she said.
In the future, therefore, when you are vomiting over the railing of a ship on a polar voyage, you might consider suggesting to your crew members that they download the Mariner 4.0 system.
Because with it, seasickness might be entirely planned away. As Dr Nicole Taylor pointed out, this will both be to the comfort of crew members and to the benefit of their mission as a whole.
Read more about Dr Nicole Taylor’s doctoral study here.
Ole Ellekrog, Polar Journal AG
More on the topic:
