The smart laboratory:

Increased efficiency
for medical courier services

A medical courier service specialises in transporting samples and medical products from/to hospitals and doctor’s surgeries.

This transport brings with it a range of challenges, which can be overcome with ease using the ginstr technology:

• Route optimisation with the travelling salesman algorithm for fewer kilometres, increased efficiency and lower costs per driver
  
• Seamless localisation of vehicles for efficient scheduling of transport orders issued at short notice
  
• Seamless monitoring and logging of the temperature in sample collection containers including real-time alerting of Quality Assurance and the driver in the event of deviations:
  this prevents samples from becoming unusable due to improper temperatures during transport.
  
• Simple assignment of the telematics units in the event of frequent changes of driver/vehicles
  

Optimal controlling
of the courier drivers

• Displaying of the collection addresses and their sequence on a mobile phone
• Simplification of the handover of samples in special cases (e.g. if the doctor’s surgery is closed)
  
• Route log with details of each collection/delivery to a doctor or hospital (e.g. signature of the receptionist, time stamp, number of samples, delay, etc.)
  
• Automatic notification of Scheduling in the event of deviations from the route plan and from the schedule; this allows Scheduling to reorganise the transport processes if necessary
  
• Logging of the delivery of samples to the laboratory
  

Seamless temperature monitoring
in refrigerators, freezers, incubators

Medical laboratories often have dozens of refrigerators, freezers and incubators for samples.
If the breakdown of one of these appliances can be identified in good time, far-reaching consequences can often be prevented (e.g. destroyed samples).

The challenge in this application has so far been that a lot of laboratory equipment is made from metal. Sensors in the appliances, therefore, had to be connected with a cable, as the measured data from inside the appliances could not be transmitted by radio signals.

A new kind of radio connection has now eliminated this problem:
the very inexpensive radio sensors from ginstr are simply placed inside the refrigerator, freezer or incubator. A receiver on the wall receives the data and forwards it to the Internet.

In larger buildings, several receivers may be required to receive reliably the data from all of the laboratory equipment.

Benefits:

• State-of-the-art, highly energy-saving radio technology
• Seamless monitoring of the temperature per laboratory appliance
• Immediate alerting in the event of deviations from the target temperature
  
• Saving of the measured values in any time intervals
• Long-term saving of the measured data
• One-time costs of less than 100 euros per laboratory appliance and running costs of less than one euro per appliance.