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BackgroundHigh-performance marine craft crews are susceptible to various adverse health conditions caused by multiple interactive factors. However, there are limited epidemiological data available for assessment of working conditions at sea. Although questionnaire surveys are widely used for identifying exposures, outcomes and associated risks with high accuracy levels, until now, no validated epidemiological tool exists for surveying occupational health and performance in these populations.AimTo develop and validate a web-based questionnaire for epidemiological assessment of occupational and individual risk exposure pertinent to the musculoskeletal health conditions and performance in high-performance marine craft populations.MethodA questionnaire for investigating the association between work-related exposure, performance and health was initially developed by a consensus panel under four subdomains, viz. demography, lifestyle, work exposure and health and systematically validated by expert raters for content relevance and simplicity in three consecutive stages, each iteratively followed by a consensus panel revision. The item content validity index (I-CVI) was determined as the proportion of experts giving a rating of 3 or 4. The scale content validity index (S-CVI/Ave) was computed by averaging the I-CVIs for the assessment of the questionnaire as a tool. Finally, the questionnaire was pilot tested.ResultsThe S-CVI/Ave increased from 0.89 to 0.96 for relevance and from 0.76 to 0.94 for simplicity, resulting in 36 items in the final questionnaire. The pilot test confirmed the feasibility of the questionnaire.ConclusionsThe present study shows that the web-based questionnaire fulfils previously published validity acceptance criteria and is therefore considered valid and feasible for the empirical surveying of epidemiological aspects among high-performance marine craft crews and similar populations.

The paper compares measurement-based measures for human vibration exposure. Data were collected during sea trials on a 10 m, 50 kn coastguard craft equipped with a three-axial accelerometer at the coxswain seat and with vertically mounted gauges measuring the acceleration of the cockpit floor. The ISO 2631-1:1997 measures of vibration (namely the root-mean-square (r.m.s.) value of the whole-body vibration (determined from the frequency-weighted acceleration signal), the maximum transient vibration value (MTVV), and the vibration dose value), the ISO 2631-5:2004 measure (namely the daily equivalent static compression dose Sed), and also statistically based measures to evaluate the acceleration magnitude are compared and discussed with respect to their ability to identify the mitigating effect of the suspension seat and how the different measures rank the severity of the high-speed craft (HSC) ride. The paper concludes that the r.m.s. value and the MTVV are unsuitable for evaluation of the conditions aboard while the other investigated measures show potential in this respect. Further the approach of ISO 2631-5:2004 taking both the short-term and the long-term perspectives on the human exposure to vibration is concluded to be the most mature method well suited to evaluation of HSC conditions.

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A comparative Life Cycle Assessment is performed for different structural material concepts on a 24-m-long high-speed patrol craft. The study is comparative and determines the differences in and sensitivities to environmental impact, especially in relation to the total impact of fuel burn for the different material concepts. The material concepts are aluminium and various composite combinations consisting of glass fibre and carbon fibre with vinyl ester resin both as single skins and as sandwich with a Divinycell foam core. Commercially available standard Life Cycle Assessment software is used for the Life Cycle Assessment calculations. The study shows that regardless of hull material concept, the environmental impact is dominated by the operational phase due to relatively large fuel consumption. In the operational phase, the lightest carbon-fibre concept is shown to have least environmental impact. Considering the manufacturing phase exclusively for the different hull concepts, it is concluded that the manufacturing of the aluminium hull has a somewhat larger environment impact for the majority of Life Cycle Assessment impact categories in comparison to the different composite hulls. The significant impact on the marine and the fresh water aquatic ecotoxicity originates from the aluminium raw material excavation and manufacturing processes. It is shown that the lightest hull, the carbon-fibre sandwich concept, with a 50% structural weight reduction compared to the aluminium design, can be utilized to reduce the fuel consumption by 20% (775 ton of diesel) over the lifetime with significant impact on the dominating environmental aspects considered herein, abiotic depletion, global warming and acidification.