A new service has been launched to ensure that blood and organs being transported by medical services stay within strict temperature thresholds, both wirelessly and automatically.
Bio-Trak is a joint venture between GPS tracking and telematics company VeriLocation; automated temperature monitoring business RAG; and laboratory services firm Lab3.
The device monitors the temperature and GPS-tracked location of human tissue every second during transport, ensuring it stays in the best possible condition.
Hospitals waiting for deliveries are also automatically alerted to imminent arrivals, helping to speed up transfer times.
Each journey has a full audit trail using accredited systems, and helps it meet “Good Distribution Practice” for transport required by the Blood Safety and Quality Regulations 2005.
All goods in transit are fitted with RFID tags, which VeriLocation’s Andrew Overton explained “makes the reporting automatic without any need to drill holes in cold storage areas of vehicles. The RFID tags can be read even through thick plastic boxes with no wires or need to physically scan anything.”
He added: “The tags report the ambient and core temperature of goods being transported, and this information plus the GPS location of the vehicle is sent over the mobile phone data networks every second.”
It means that the progress of the journey, plus the temperature can be monitored by anyone with a computer connected to the internet.
A full accredited audit trail is automatically created and any breach of temperature thresholds raises an automatic alarm.
The technologies were initially combined for use in the food transport industry.
