Automated Temperature Monitoring - By Actility, Ezurio (formerly Laird Connectivity), and MyDevices

Published on February 11, 2021

The Need

For logistics, transport, restaurants, hospitals, and other service/hospitality companies that need to monitor their inventory, a broken cold chain is an interrupted series of refrigerated production, storage, and distribution activities. For food service providers, who provide prepared meals outside the home, maintaining a controlled low-temperature range is essential.

The major challenge for managers in these industries is to identify where the biggest loss of precious inventory occurs along the chain and to optimize the operation of the equipment involved. To do this, it is essential for providers to have tools to:

Optimize the end customer organization through automated processes and rely less on human manual interactions.
Automatically identify operational deficiencies and have real-time access to temperature data.
Act quickly on food safety faults.
Achieve global costs savings and regulatory compliance with an easy-to-install and operate solution.
Keep track of logs and access to data history.
Define and measure service targets to be achieved using key performance indicators (KPI).

Solution

To meet these objectives and automate the entire processes, Actility developed an IoT food safety solution by monitoring, measuring, recording, and alerting on real time food and inventory temperature readings. These solutions allow our clients to act quickly to save precious inventory and protect consumers.

To protect against cold chain failures, the first step is to identify and analyse temperature and humidity data. To do so, it is necessary to put in place an easily installed and operated IoT platform that includes:

Ezurio Sensors - to collect and report data in real-time.
Actility LoRaWAN IoT Gateways and Network Server and Connectivity to transmit this data into the cloud.
myDevices application to provision devices, remote monitor, visualize data, and receive alerts if temperatures are out of range, plus device history and compliance reports.

The Actility-Ezurio-myDevices wireless solution:

Automates the monitoring of data quality and integrity.
Virtualizes the logistics chain and associated services and creates digital models of real assets.
Structures temperature and industry knowledge into real actionable data.
Interacts with humans to understand the industrial context and qualify the data.

The Actility / Ezurio / myDevices partnership implements a complete IoT value chain.

Ezurio sensors are mounted inside refrigeration units for 24/7 temperature monitoring. A sensor with a probe is either in direct contact with the material it needs to monitor, or in a designated environment. The collection of temperature and humidity data is carried out through the sensors to supervise the industrial equipment.

Actility LoRaWAN IoT Gateways relay data from the sensors and send them to Actility LoRaWAN Network Server.

Actility LoRaWAN Network Server process the sensors data and relay them in real time to the end-user application.

Data is ingested in the myDevices mobile & Web application, launching automated procedures such as data log visualization, regulatory reports, notifications, sensor maps and more.

Integrated Temperature and Humidity Sensor

The Sentrius RS1xx Series are battery powered, long range integrated sensor platforms leveraging the benefits of LoRaWAN and Bluetooth Low Energy (Bluetooth LE) connectivity. Its small, rugged form factor contains superior RF performance and flexibility with precise temperature and humidity sensors.

The Sentrius RS1xx with integrated Temperature / Humidity sensor was an ideal fit for the Actility solution. It features an operating temperature range from -25°C to +50°C and accuracy range as follows;

Temperature Accuracy Ranges:

-10° to +85°C (+/-0.4°C)
-40° to +125°C (+/-1.1°C)

Humidity Accuracy Ranges:

0 – 90% RH (+/- 3%)
90 – 100% RH (+/- 4.5%)

Typical installation environments

Industrial kitchens
Inside freezers refrigerators
Transportation vehicles

External Temperature Probe Sensor

The Sentrius RS1xx with External Temperature Sensor is equipped with a wide-ranging external temperature probe. Another ideal fit for the Actility solution, with an operating temperature range from -55°C to 125°C and accuracy range as follows:

Temperature Accuracy Ranges:

-10° to 85°C (+/-0.5°C)
-55° to +125°C (+/-0.9°C)

The RS1xx series provides LoRaWAN options in 868, 915, and 923 MHz frequencies, plus Bluetooth for local data display, configuration and troubleshooting.

Typical installation environments

Liquid, raw materials.
Industrial kitchens, inside freezers, refrigerators
Transportation vehicles.

Results

This easy-to-implement solution helps companies save on operational costs via enhanced automation and visibility. It makes regulatory compliance easier than ever, promotes food safety for customers, and helps businesses achieve a wide range of organizational objectives.

Knowing the temperature of their perishable goods every step of the way prevents food safety mishaps.

An automated temperature monitoring solution based on LoRaWAN technology enables:

Long range wireless functionality – signals penetrate well thick walls.
Low-power use – devices can last years on a single battery.
Affordable - inexpensive devices and gateways.
Secured – advanced and standard end-to-end encryption algorithm.

Get your IoT automated temperature monitoring solution today and join the hundreds of end-customers already benefiting from such service.

Learn more about Actility.