Globally, people are living longer and seeking ways to age with dignity and independence, which brings massive implications and an enormous opportunity for our community. In Australia, properties and amenities are designed retirement villages for aged people who want to keep living independently in a private home while enjoying shared facilities and the benefits of community living. The services offered by retirement villages vary from facility to facility, but monitoring of medication is a standardized service. To fulfill compliance requirements, villages need a solution to monitor the temperature in medicine fridges efficiently. Thus, Extranet Systems and Milesight partner to improve healthcare safety and compliance with Milesight LoRaWAN® hardware in aged care facilities across Australia.
Challenges
Any accidental power failure or increase in temperature all of a sudden will lead to a loss to the stored items, such as food and medication may spoil if the refrigerator breaks down. However, the current facility fails to uninterruptedly monitor, record, and alert the concerned person in case of changes in temperature or humidity.
- Recording & Reporting Interval
The main challenge is the interval. Before deploying this IoT solution, they can only monitor the fridge every 8 hours due to the shortage of staff.
- Real-Time Alerts
They are also struggling with the reporting and real-time alerts since the paper-based solution they used to have cannot produce any of these.
When considering whether an IoT solution may qualify for long-term use, our partner weighs all factors like quality, cost, power, and distance coverage together. Thus, Extranet Systems as the solution provider picked Milesight LoRaWAN® products at the first stage.
Project
The project involves more than 20 aged care sites with a variety of sizes across New South Wales, Queensland, Victoria, and Canberra in Australia. More than a hundred units of IoT devices are adopted in three stages that span over 18 months, from March 2021 to October 2022.
Temperature monitoring is the main application for this project but based on the success of stages 1 and 2, the end customers are looking for extended applications such as monitoring the air quality in the office environment.
Solution
Regulating the medicine fridge temperature correctly is vital to ensure the healthcare safety and quality of nursing services in the villages. Today, a LoRaWAN based temperature and humidity monitoring solution can prevent food and medicine contamination.
This project brings a solid IoT solution for aged care facilities to monitor and track the temperature of their medicines and vaccine fridges. More than 25 units of UG67 outdoor LoRaWAN gateways have been deployed for this project alongside more than 150 units of EM300-TH temperature monitoring sensors.
The client is highly satisfied with the solution, more types of sensors including AM319 are being introduced to the next stage of the project.
Related Products
Get started with a LoRaWAN temperature and humidity monitoring solution, here is everything that you need to set up the solution:
- UG67 outdoor LoRaWAN gateway
- UG65 indoor LoRaWAN gateway
- EM300-TH temperature and humidity sensor
- AM319 ambiance monitoring sensor
Deployment
This temperature monitoring solution comprises Milesight sensors and gateways as well as the application platform from Extranet Systems.
The LoRaWAN based temperature and humidity sensors (EM300-TH) in medical/food fridges are easily installed in more than 100 medicine fridges with a reporting interval of 5 minutes-way beyond the capacity of manual logging. Therefore, the storage units are kept at the proper temperature and humidity to ensure healthcare safety and compliance.
A few units of the AM319 ambiance sensors are deployed in offices to measure the level of CO2, VOCs, PM2.5, and some other harmful gases, allowing users to check it on screen via the vivid emoticon indication or traffic light status indicator, which safeguards the staff away from the air pollution.
Gateways are deployed for different sites depending on the size. The industrial-grade gateways UG67 are wall-mounted to cover a wide area in aged care facilities, one of the gateways even covers sensors across 3 buildings with strong signal strength, and a few units of UG65 semi-industrial gateways are deployed in limited space for specific small area coverage.
Every 5 minutes, these sensors periodically transmit the temperature, humidity, and air quality data to the LoRaWAN gateways. The built-in network server of gateways then sends the information by MQTT protocol to Extranet Systems’ cloud platform for permanent storage and various analysis purposes. Inside the fridge, if the temperature value is above the reference value, to maintain within the threshold levels of 2℃ to 8℃, alerts can be delivered and the fridge can be checked quickly. From there the nursing staff is given a bird’s eye view of every sensor in every location and can generate reports, charts, and audit logs.
Thanks to the excellent outcome, users are looking forward to deploying more temperature sensors as well as other types of sensors like the emergency button sensor.
Benefits
One of many important tasks for nursing staff in retirement villages is ensuring their medicine fridge temperatures are within range.
- Precision Temperature Control
The temperature of fridges is within the optimal range between 2℃ to 8℃ (36°F and 46°F) to meet the legal compliance and healthcare safety requirement.
- Intensive Report Interval
The sensors measure the fridge temperature every five minutes for long-term monitoring and analysis.
- Real-time Alerts
Take immediate action when the temperature is outside the recommended range or if there is an equipment or power failure.
- Flexibility at Scale
The LoRa technology has a high potential for scalability by increasing the number of gateways and sensors that can accelerate the capacity of covering from a small facility to the retirement village.
Why Milesight
- Competitive price of the Milesight products
- Solid hardware design and rich features provided by the gateways
- Professional customer service and real-time technical support
“From our deployment experience, Milesight provides technical, marketing and product support in an almost real-time fashion, ” said System Engineer and AWS Solutions Architect Professional Max Cheng. "This solution is fantastic, and provides a lot of possibilities to aged care facilities to leverage the IoT technologies."
Customer
Extranet Systems has assembled one of the strongest teams in the world of software development and IT has to offer. With more than 45 years of combined experience, anything is possible when you work with us.
