Nine Million Watch Hours of Data Rewrite the Rest-Hour Debate

Watch-hour research corpora have historically been measured in thousands of officer-hours. A dataset of nine million continuous watch hours, assembled across cargo fleets running bridge-watch telemetry, is a step-change. This post walks through what the scale actually reveals.

The maritime-fatigue research community has produced careful, hard-won work for thirty years. Project HORIZON ran 90 officer volunteers across simulator trials. Project MARTHA, summarized in the Solent overview of the longitudinal fatigue dataset, tracked multi-month tours. The Cardiff Seafarers International Research Centre health and healthcare study is the gold-standard seafarer-health corpus. The University of Southern Denmark systematic review aggregated two decades of research. The Springer systematic review of determinants of seafarers' fatigue catalogs the peer-reviewed literature. Every one of those efforts was funded, carefully designed, and painfully bounded in sample size.