Soon, Onshore Doctors for Injured Navy Sailors on Warships, Submarines

BENGALURU: Soon, Indian sailors getting injured onboard warships or submarines will have access to onshore medical experts, a service the Indian Navy wanted for its warriors for quite a while.
The Navy, which has more than 130 ships and 10 submarines, has recently placed an order to initiate the acquisition of a rugged portable tele-medicine system for healthcare management on its warships and submarines.

While the system was designed and developed by DRDO’s Defence Bio-Engineering and Electro Medical Laboratory (DEBEL) in Bengaluru, it will be supplied to the Navy by a Mumbai firm — Maestros Electronics and Telecommunications Systems Limited (METSL).

Work on the product had been going on for nearly a decade during which multiple user trials were also conducted. In 2015, the DRDO finally transferred the technology to METSL, a senior DRDO scientist associated with the project said.
Confirming this, METSL told TOI in an email: “The order is worth Rs 91 crore and the delivery begins in September and first set of units will be operational by December 2019.”
The system consists of hardware to acquire vital parameters of patients — such as ECG, blood pressure, respiration rate, heart rate, oxygen saturation, and body temperature — through the Biomedical Data Acquisition System (BioDAS) and a military grade laptop.

“The system works on NAVY satellite network which has extremely limited bandwidth for noncore applications. The devices used are military grade or specially designed for these type of application. Most importantly it transmits data in real-time with bandwidth limitation,” METSL said.

“The system can store and transmit annotated data, and can open up a real time live channel for high quality video conferencing. This data can be transmitted over various communication channels, and includes the capability to interface with satellites,” the DRDO said in a statement.
DEBEL’s system comprises indigenously developed BioDAS, and has been successfully demonstrated in extensive trials carried out in ships and submarines in various operational scenarios. “It is designed to operate in rigours of all naval environments,” DRDO added.
At present, the Navy has one doctor onboard its vessels and in cases of all major injuries, the sailors need to be airlifted to one of the command hospitals, or a major military hospital that is closest since the onboard doctor is usually not a specialist.
The Navy itself has three command hospitals — INS Sanjivani in Kerala, INS Kalyani in Visakhapatnam and INS Ashwini in Mumbai — where sailors are taken.
METSL, which holds the DEBEL technology, will implement the project. A source from the company said that this would be a complete solution with multiple medical devices and software to support it. This will be a holistic system with the ability to record various vital parameters and also uses multiple scopes (equipment).

Source: ToI

Image Courtesy: Army Calling