Requirements, Challenges, and Key Components to Improve Onboard Medical Care Using Maritime Telemedicine: Narrative Review

Table 4

The main challenges and their subdomain.

Main categories	Related challenges
Cost	High equipment costs on board
	High costs of implementing telehealth service in ships for communication with the telemedicine service provider
	Lack of insurance coverage
	Communication via satellite
	High costs of medical equipment such as telespirometry, radiology units, and wireless devices
Human resources	Requires a 24-hour standby person to communicate and receive advice
	Need ship-trained personnel to carry out medical orders and communicate properly with telemedicine services
	The telephysician should know the maritime vocabulary
Atmospheric conditions	Impact of bad weather on quality of bandwidth
	Impact of bad weather on onboard equipment
Telehealth service	Designing an easy-use user interface (UI) and intuitive handling of the system
	Data privacy and confidentiality
	Documentation and data storage
	Lack of data standards for interoperability between maritime systems and telemedicine providers
	Lack of necessary infrastructure for implementation and usage of IoT and big data analysis