With over 50,000 merchant vessels and nearly two million seafarers operating globally, more than 12,000 maritime incidents in the past decade underscore the urgent need for proactive safety measures to ensure the structural integrity of aging ships and safeguard the well-being of seafarers, who face harsh ocean environments in remote locations. The Digital Healthcare Engineering (DHE) framework offers a proactive solution to these challenges, comprising five interconnected modules: (1) real-time monitoring and measurement of health parameters, (2) transmission of collected data to land-based analytics centers, (3) data analytics and simulations leveraging digital twins, (4) AI-driven diagnostics and recommendations for remedial actions, and (5) predictive health analysis for optimal maintenance planning. This paper reviews the core technologies required to implement the DHE framework in real-world settings, with a specific focus on the well-being of seafarers and offshore workers, referred to as Human DHE (HDHE). Key technical challenges are identified, and practical solutions to address these challenges are proposed for each individual module. This paper also outlines future research directions to advance the development of an HDHE system, aiming to enhance the safety, health, and overall well-being of seafarers operating in demanding maritime environments.

Sagittal craniosynostosis (SC) is a congenital condition whereby the newborn skull develops abnormally owing to the premature ossification of the sagittal suture. Spring-assisted cranioplasty (SAC) is a minimally invasive surgical technique to treat SC, where metallic distractors are used to reshape the newborn’s head. Although safe and effective, SAC outcomes remain uncertain owing to the limited understanding of skull−distractor interaction and the limited information provided by the analysis of single surgical cases. In this work, an SC population-averaged skull model was created and used to simulate spring insertion by means of the finite-element analysis using a previously developed modelling framework. Surgical parameters were varied to assess the effect of osteotomy and spring positioning, as well as distractor combinations, on the final skull dimensions. Simulation trends were compared with retrospective measurements from clinical imaging (X-ray and three-dimensional photogrammetry scans). It was found that the on-table post-implantation head shape change is more sensitive to spring stiffness than to the other surgical parameters. However, the overall end-of-treatment head shape is more sensitive to spring positioning and osteotomy size parameters. The results of this work suggest that SAC surgical planning should be performed in view of long-term results, rather than immediate on-table reshaping outcomes.

This study extends the authors’ previous numerical and experimental studies simulating the progressive collapse of steel stiffened-plate structures in fire events (Paik JK, Ryu MG, He KH, Lee DH, Lee SY, Park DK, Thomas G. 2021a. Full-scale fire testing to collapse of steel stiffened plate structures under lateral patch loading (part 1) – without passive fire protection. Ships Offsh Struct. 16(3):227–242; Paik JK, Ryu MG, He KH, Lee DH, Lee SY, Park DK, Thomas G. 2021b. Full-scale fire testing to collapse of steel stiffened plate structures under lateral patch loading (part 2) – with passive fire protection. Ships Offsh Struct. 16(3):243–254; Ryu MG, He KH, Lee DH, Park SI, Thomas G, Paik JK. 2021. Finite element modeling for the progressive collapse analysis of steel stiffened-plate structures in fires. Thin-Walled Struct. 159:107262). Specifically, this study demonstrates that the computational models developed in the earlier studies can be applied to the analysis of the heat transfer and fire-induced progressive collapse behaviour of the topside structures of a ship-shaped offshore installation. To this end, a hypothetical VLCC-class floating, production, storage and offloading (FPSO) unit hull structure is considered, and transient thermal elastic-plastic large-deformation finite element models are used. The novelty of this study and its contribution to industry are the development of a practical procedure to ensure the fire safety of large-scale steel-plated structures with complex geometries.