Powerpath Temperature Monitor

Client Requirements

Across the world, millions of dollars’ worth of medicines is wasted every year. During a patient’s hospital journey, there are many points where medicines wastage could occur. The pharmacy staff can help identify and work on innovative solutions to reduce this wastage. For certain life-saving medicines, refrigeration at a specific temperature is mandatory. A single refrigerator unit in the hospital stores hundreds of drugs worth thousands of dollars. These refrigerator units are opened multiple times every hour by nurses. Unfortunately, when that happens, thousands of dollars’ worth of life-saving medicines is spoiled and go waste.

The client wanted a solution to reduce such wastage, thus, saving money, time and even lives.

Solution

An innovative Bluetooth powered IoT device with multiple temperature probes attached is used in the field. Each temperature probe is capable of monitoring the temperature of a refrigeration unit or other medical assets. This device would then interact with the REST API that is provided. It would call the API periodically to report the temperature recordings and on an adhoc basis to alert the server of any excursion outside the configured temperature range.

The server would then record the temperature time series data and process any temperature excursion alerts that the monitor might have sent. The server will notify the medical staff of the excursion on their preferred mode of communication - Email, SMS, Voice Call or Pager. It also creates an incident associated with each unique alert raised by the devices that can be viewed on the incident management portal.

This is a classic IoT implementation where thousands of IoT devices communicate with a cloud server every few minutes. The server processes the data and makes decisions based on it.

An iPhone application was also developed that would allow clients to pair the device with their iPhone via BLE and get real time temperature readings.

Results

The IoT solution created was a breakthrough in the technology field. This helped in reducing the wastage of medicines thereby saving a lot of resources and money.

The user gets easy alert through Email, SMS, Voice Call or Pager and can act accordingly. The incident management portal creates reports of each unique alert raised by the devices which can be used for internal training and analysis to prevent future incidents.