ANDREW Cowderoy was a young British merchant navy cadet when he discovered he had a medical condition that cut short his sea-going career. It meant he would never pass the medical to continue at sea. This was a few years ago and the UK economy was far from ideal for a young man with no university education, let alone his certificate of competence to show he had passed muster in his chosen industry, to find work.
Coming from a shipowning family (his grandfather and father were owners of Harrison (Clyde)) he found himself taking small shipping jobs in London when he realised he needed to dome something about his health. A London lifestyle meant he was soon putting on weight and with the disappointment of his illness always on his mind, took to the gym.
Meeting with personal trainers, and even becoming a trainer himself, soon gave him the idea that would become ZS Wellness, the company he registered and started up in May this year.
Crew physical health, and here it is meant beyond the rather basic medial certificate they need to attain before they can even step aboard a ship, has become a growing issue.Even the IMO amended its rules for approving lifeboat designs a decade ago, taking an “assumed occupant mass” of 82.5kg instead of the former 75kg.
Mental health is also a growing concern, particularly suicide rates . P&I Clubs, such as the UK P&I, are aware that a crew member’s mental health poses a significant risk to a vessel’s profitability.
As Cowderoy puts it, a vessel deviation due to a crew related incident can be a huge off-hire cost. His idea was to give crews a level of access to health advice that was similar to that his city colleagues were getting when they go to the gym.
He and his family have self funded ZS Wellness and have now been working with wearable health device maker Garmin and Oracle, which has a IT cloud solution, to create a platform that crew members can use to monitor their health and then get advice
It’s not about getting the crews to be super fit, he says. But it is about getting the crews to spend half an hour of their day, in their cabins or elsewhere on the ship, doing some routine exercises.
It works because the crew member gets to feel cared for he says. The device they wear is a basic fitness wristband one can buy in a high street shop, and through this they can load the data into the Oracle cloud and a trainer can assess the parameters that are available from the device, notably heart beat.
“We can learn a lot from just the heart beat,” says Cowderoy. “The different heart rates between rest and exercise can tell us whether the crew member is getting enough rest, we can determine stress levels and through that a general picture of their mental health can be made.”
ZS Wellness has a number of volunteers using the system at the moment as it pushes to role out the service and Cowderoy is in talks with a couple of shipowners and managers who realise this system could heave some real power in giving the crews the encouragement they need to get fit, stay fit and indeed, be happy.
That’s why the Fathom Smart Ship Awards judges voted for this as the 2017 start-up of the year. ZS Wellnness is making smart use of existing technology to create smarter healthier crews.
Fathom-News.com
