A Bridge Navigational Watch Alarm System (hereafter 'BNWAS') is to monitor and detect if an officer of watch(hereafter ‘OOW’) keeps a sharp lookout on the bridge. The careless lookout of an OOW could lead to marine accidents. For this reason on June 5th, 2009, IMO decided that a ship is equipped with a BNWAS. However, an existing BNWAS gives the OOW a lot of inconvenience and stress in its operation. It requires that the OOW should press reset buttons to confirm their alert watch on the bridge at every three to twelve minute. Many OOWs have complained that at some circumstances they cannot focus on their bridge activities including watch-keeping due to a lots of resetting inputs of BNWAS. Accordingly, IMO has allowed the use of a motion sensor as a resetting device. The motion sensor detects the movements of human body on the bridge and subsequently sends reset signals directly to BNWAS automatically. As a result, OOWs can work uninterrupted. However, some of classification societies and flag authorities have a slightly different stance on the use of motion sensor as a resetting method for BNWAS. The reason is that the motion sensor may trigger false reset signals caused by the motion of objects on the bridge, especially a slight movement such as toss and turn of human body which can extend the period of careless watch. As a basic study to minimize the false reset signals, this paper proposes a simple configuration of BNWAS, which consists of only three motion sensors associated with ‘AND’ and ‘OR’ logic gates. Additionally, several considerations are also proposed for the implementation of motion sensors. This study found that the proposed configuration which consists of three motion sensors is better than an existing one by reducing false reset signals caused by a slight movement of human body in one’s sleep. The proposed configuration in this paper filters false reset signals and is simple to be implemented on existing vessels. In addition, it can be easily installed just by a basic electrical knowledge.

Marine accidents related to the tug-barges are frequent recently, such as oil spill caused by collision between oil tankers and tug-barges. There are many causes of these accidents, but poor working condition of operators takes up a considerable part of most causes. That is, the danger of accidents caused by fatigue accumulation exists in tug-barges of less than 200 gross tonnage engaged on near-coastal voyages or short shipping, because of the long-distance navigational watch by only one master. This paper aims to deduce problems of human element part out of the plan of sqfe navigation, and to propose legal amendments for preventing marine accidents by tug-barges.