Remote Medical Assistance for Marine Fishermen through OceanNet

Pervasive new advancements and internet connectivity have brought modern visions for medical diagnosis. Sensors on the patients' body can track parameters such as body temperature, pulse rate, and other medical signals in real time. Any abnormal deviations in the parameters can alert doctors to provide immediate attention. Marine fisherman travel into deep sea for their livelihood. They may stay up to a week, 100km away from land. During these times they are cut off from the land and do not have any support in case of emergencies. They often face issues such as sea sickness, mild fever and diarrhoea. We propose to develop a primary diagnosis device for marine fisherman and help them connect with doctors on the shore. We propose to build this device for the OceanNet marine communication infrastructure. The device will help doctors to diagnose the fisherman remotely and provide first level medical aid. Parameters such as heart rate, body temperature and respiration rate are captured by the device and sent to doctors using OceanNet network. Doctors can analyse the data and prescribe medicines to the fisherman. We also developed a mobile application which can suggest medicines if the device is unable to connect to a doctor immediately. In this paper, we discuss the architecture of the proposed diagnostic device. We have built a prototype of the proposed device and we discuss the results in this paper.