SoftwareOne case study
University of Gothenburg & NATO
The University of Gothenburg is conducting a study into the effects of high-speed boats on the human body.
One of the two tools pivotal to the research was developed by SoftwareOne (formerly Crayon) – a multi-tenant analytical platform and dashboard on AWS for the billions of data points from the boats. This integrates with an app for boat personnel to log their pain symptoms.
SoftwareOne's AWS Platform powers NATO-study on high-speed boat shocks
Operators and Scientists have known for a long time that exposure to the impacts on modern high-speed boats causes severe and permanent injuries. Still, no knowledge exists about which levels and types of impacts that are injurious and what exposure is sustainable.
The NATO research project is led by the University of Gothenburg with funding from the Swedish military and the Science & Technology arm of NATO (NATO STO HFM RTG 344), among others. It is truly international in scope: 15 nations and up to 20 military, sea rescue and coastguard agencies participate in the study known as MASHIEN (Multi-Agency Study on Human Impact Exposure). Four nations: Germany, Canada, Belgium, and the Netherlands Antilles have commenced pilot studies
What does this project involve, and how is SoftwareOne contributing?
Human Impact Exposure onboard High Speed Boats, as the study is officially called, is the brainchild of Dr Johan Ullman, a Swedish Navy doctor and PhD candidate at the University of Gothenburg. Dr. Ullman has been a long-time advocate for protecting the well-being of personnel on high-speed boats.
“Many years ago, I served onboard the Swedish Flagship,” says Dr Ullman. “As part of my job, I did checkups on the conscripts returning home after nine months on board our motor torpedo boats. I was surprised that almost all of them – 85 percent – complained of back problems.”
Ullman also observed that the “classical” research into this phenomenon measured the vibration of the boats, not the impact. “This way of thinking is now obsolete because what damages the integrity of human anatomic structures are the impacts, the slamming, of high-speed boats.”
The first pillar of the study is to measure the amplitude of these impacts, their duration, and Rise times – “ The rise times tell us how fast we go from zero to maximum acceleration,” explains Ullman, “a very important factor.”
Accelerometres are placed on the hull of the high-speed boat, as well as on the driver and navigator, measuring impact in three axes and sampling at 600 Hz on nine channels, resulting in 5,700 data points per second per boat.
“So we need a very big database in the 4 to 8 terabyte range,” Ullman adds. This data analysis platform for the study has been built by SoftwareOne as a unified multi-tenant application on AWS.
“We needed to provide a multi-tenant platform so that each agency could upload its data while ensuring data privacy,” explains Francesco Caroli, Head of Data Platforms & Engineering at SoftwareOne’s Data and AI Centre of Excellence in Vienna. “Each agency can only see its own data, while researchers from the research team can access all the data for analysis.”
- Client
- University of Gothenburg and NATO
- Industry
- Education
- Platform
- AWS Cloud
- Services
- Cloud Services
- Country
- Sweden
Thanks to the efficient and insightful work of Crayon, we can scale up. The technological cornerstone of the research, the data platform with the impact data and the pain logs, has been successfully implemented in AWS.
A Swedish Navy doctor and PhD candidate at the University of Gothenburg
In addition to the platform, and the data analysis engine, Caroli built a dashboard that provides a clear visualisation of the data, helping individual nations and agencies understand the impacts of their high-speed boats.
The dashboard not only incorporates the measured impacts of the high-speed boats but also the subjective experience of boat crews via the app where they log their pain anonymously. Access to the app is by a unique QR code. Therefore, the platform only contains sensor data and pain data without any personal information.
“The scientific backbone of the app is a methodology called ‘Pain Drawing’. In the app, subjects mark levels and types of pain on diagrams of a human body, front and back and log which boat or boats they were onbord, and when.
“Francesco is absolutely fantastic when it comes to understanding the need for the interface between the software and the human,” says Ullman. “This is critical to the success of the project because we need to have compliance with hundreds of people around the world in different language areas and have them feed in the data.”
“Francesco and I are still refining the dashboard,” Ullman continues. “We are in constant touch about it. A particular challenge is the translation of pain modalities such as ‘sharp pain’, ‘dull pain’, ‘tingling’, ‘throbbing’, and so on – these are not precise medical terms, which makes them hard to capture an align in different languages.
Also, the dashboard allows a graphic representation of the impacts and to zoom in on discrete impacts to see even data points.
Individual nations and agencies can access the dashboard to track their own exposure data.
“An API links the pain log data from the app to the exposure data platform,” says Caroli, “and eventually, a deeper analysis will reveal correlations between several characteristics of the hull impacts and the pain reported by the people manning those boats.”
The ultimate objective of the research is to find ‘the sweet spot’ where injury can be prevented by slowing down the boat.
“We will soon start crunching the pilot data coming in from four nations,” says Ullman. “This project will continue collecting data for a few years.
Scientific studies on humans and multifactorial exposure require many subjects and large volumes of exposure data to reach statistical power. More nations and agencies are still joining.
“Thanks to the efficient and insightful work of Crayon, we can scale up. The technological cornerstone of the research, the data platform with the impact data and the pain logs, has been successfully implemented in AWS. As I said, the work with Francesco is ongoing, but we owe him a great debt of gratitude.”
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