Gain from pain in boat race study
What is billed as the world’s largest power boat race will serve as a test bed for measuring and comparing impact exposure on high speed craft.
Next June, 50 boats, all monohulls, will start at the 0 meridian in Greenwich UK and run 2,500 nautical miles over 10 to 12 race days to finish in Monte Carlo during the grand opening of the new Monte Carlo Yacht Club.
When asked to be the race doctor, Johan Ullman M.D. accepted, on condition that he could wire all the hulls and two operators on each boat with accelerometers.
Three navies and three universities support the research project, which is designed to measure and compare impact exposure on both hulls and humans. New impact data loggers have been developed, as well as a new app, PainDrawing, for logging any development of pain during the race.
The marine data loggers, MAREC, are developed by Research Electronics in Sweden. The MARECs record accelerations in three axis on the hulls and vertical accelerations on two crew on each boat. Sampling is done 600 times per second, along with GPS data for position, speed and heading. The track can then also be displayed on Google Earth, showing the impact levels along the course.
The PainDrawing app has already found its way into other medical fields, where pain needs to be quantified in a scientific way. It is free to download at Appstore and at PainDrawing.com.
“Pain is a physiological function with a clear task, to tell us what is not good for us. Pain is the only measurable physiologic parameter that can be justified to use to assess risks of threatened injury,says Dr Ullman.
“By comparing impact exposure and development of pain over time, we can, for the first time, establish limits for how much exposure can be expected to cause injury.”
This study will hopefully give data for new more relevant standards than the current ones, which are all based not on impacts but on mean values of vibration.
