A novel ubiquitous system to monitor medicinal cold chains in transportation

Abstract

Cold chain is a term related to the equipment and processes used to keep the correct temperature, in which the products, such as food, vaccines, blood, tissues, amongst others, should be stable to be preserved. Any change in temperature can cause a damage in the specific properties in products. Because of that, it is mandatory to constantly monitor temperature and log it to offer traceability. Furthermore, if products must be transported, the position coordinates should be taken into account as well, due to the possibility of making mistakes in logistics personnel, taking non-optimal routes to arrive to the destination, and increasing transportation time. Thus, logistics managers need tools to measure, save and analyze temperature and position in real time to make the most optimal decisions. The implementation of systems meeting Ubiquitous Computing can fulfill the challenge, because the generated information is available to be read, modified and stored everywhere and every time. Besides, messengers can be warned about anomalies regarding change of temperatures or coordinates, adding context awareness to the system. This work aims to show a novel architecture to monitor cold chains by using Ubiquitous Computing paradigm, by means of Single Board Computers. The system includes instrumentation, embedded processing with Single Board Computers, real time databases, Human Computer Interfaces, remote management and support to deploy a complete solution. By using this system, companies ensure traceability and integrity of data in cold chains. A study case is presented to validate the approach.