The future of commercial shipping depends on crew retention, but to attract people to maritime careers, these jobs must maintain a certain level of safety and satisfaction. Now, a new tool aims to achieve this by giving seafarers a stronger voice – and giving management real insights on where to improve.

We spoke with Yassin Askar, cofounder and chief product designer for the Copenhagen-based startup Scoutbase, to learn more about how his company is disrupting commercial shipping for the better.

What Does Scoutbase Do?

Like the best tech innovations, Scoutbase is as simple as it is effective. The app aims to fix a longstanding issue in maritime work: With vessels all over the world, shipping companies have a limited understanding of crew health and wellness.

“Historically, you call up the captain or officer and ask, ‘How are things going?’,” Yassin explains. “But this only gives you their perspective, and how they feel may be different from how the rest of the crew feels.”

Scoutbase fosters transparency by allowing crew members to provide anonymous feedback directly. Using a simple chatbot interface, it asks a safety-critical question every 48 hours from a revolving bank of questions, and each one takes less than 30 seconds to answer.

Questions include “How are you sleeping lately?” or “What’s the most stressful part of your job?” The user then chooses from multiple answers. Using real-time AI, Scoutbase analyses around 20,000 data points a month, assigns each one a sentiment score, and uses them to paint a full and honest picture of crew life.

Is the crew eating and sleeping well? Are they overworked, under too much pressure, being mistreated or feeling dissatisfied? Fatigue, for example, is a leading cause of onboard accidents and injuries, but seafarers often feel pressure to quietly work through their exhaustion. It’s these types of cultural issues that Scoutbase wants to cure.

Turning Data into Opportunities

Scoutbase’s AI scores every answer as positive, neutral, negative or critical. Critical alerts, like issues with sexual harassment, are expedited directly to the client and flagged for immediate action.

Overall, data is collated in an online dashboard that helps the client track trends, monitor issues and identify where action should be taken. Collecting this amount of data on human factors can help create a safer, resilient and more productive fleet.

“It’s almost like customer support for seafarers,” says Yassin. “On one ship, Scoutbase helped uncover that the crew mattresses hadn’t been updated in a decade. This led to a fleet-wide bedding update, which had a direct impact on crew wellness.” 

Scoutbase wasn’t designed as a digital complaint box, though, or a space for anonymous tattletales.

The platform aims to help management mitigate risk through informed, proactive decisions. The kind of data it collects can reduce accidents and injuries, uncover workplace bullying and harassment, and avoid major losses to productivity and talent, all of which carry real financial consequences.

In other words, Scoutbase can support better business.

Understanding how a crew is doing and what they need to succeed is the first step to creating a culture of proactive change in an industry that’s often slow to adapt.

“Many clients say they wish they started this sooner,” says Yassin. “One of them told us it’s like shining a light on the challenges that lurk in the shadows, and to take those insights away now would be like going back to the dark ages.”

Implementing Scoutbase is like releasing a pressure valve, allowing long-festering issues to rise to the surface. But once managers adjust to receiving sometimes challenging feedback, the benefits to both workers and operators alike are expansive, not to mention the broader impact it can have on maritime industry.

A prosperous future for commercial shipping depends on its ability to attract and retain talent, and Scoutbase is here to support this goal, one question at a time.

VIKAND and Scoutbase share a common purpose around seafarer wellness and sustainability in the maritime industry. The integration of Scoutbase’s safety and wellbeing tools into VIKAND’s healthcare solutions technology will give ship operators a better understanding of the real-time challenges faced by their crew members. Contact us today to learn more!