ON THE USE OF MOBILE APPS FOR IMPROVED MARITIME SAFETY

In the summer of 2011, a simple, efficient, and low development cost Small Craft Motion Program (SCraMP) was released for iOS devices, with successive updates and enhancements in the time since. The purpose of this effort was to empower low budget operators with critical information pertaining to the state of their vessel. Capitalizing upon internal device hardware that would have cost thousands of dollars only a few years ago, the iOS application provides acceleration and rotation data, an index measure of severity of motions, statistics related to motions, and location information in a simple and interactive graphical user interface. This paper will discuss the use of smartphone applications like SCraMP as occupational safety intervention tools specific to maritime operations. Included in the paper will be an overview of SCraMP along with user feedback as to how such an app can inform operational decisions for safety. The author will also discuss a second maritime safety app recently developed and released in partnership with the Alaska Marine Safety and Education Association (AMSEA) entitled FVdrills which delivers previously published drill checklists (Jensen and Dzugan, 2009) into a smartphone app format. Therefore, the focus of the paper will be upon improving maritime safety via comparably low-cost, portable, smartphones to deliver data to operators and the ensuing user feedback