Healthcare, or vaccines, in particular, are more valuable than ever in current times. Many diseases, over time, have been cured with vaccines. Availability of medications has played a significant role in saving lives. Similarly, lack of vaccination and medicine can have profound effects. As per the World Health Organization, better vaccine coverage can save around 1.5 million lives every year. Therefore, it is crucial to managing supplies, transport, and preserve these healthcare necessities. The Internet of Things can allow complete care for such valuable pharmaceuticals. IoT-based medical fridges can help avoid any waste of drugs by managing the atmosphere to preserve medications.
What Are IoT Medical Fridges?
Current world dynamics require worldwide transport of drugs and pharmaceuticals. Healthcare industries are investing a significant amount of money to ensure the proper preservation of medicines. This preservation at least focuses on maintaining suitable environmental conditions for vaccines. IoT medical fridges are the key to seamless monitoring of storage conditions. Moreover, these medical fridges serve the purpose of mobility as well. Furthermore, these IoT medical fridges can facilitate the supply of vaccines to people in remote areas. Leveraging IoT to monitor and control temperature is a feasible and reliable application. Therefore, many healthcare brands are already implementing these freezers for their supply chains.
Key Advantages Of Medical Fridges Using IoT:
There are several advantages of medical fridges beyond just temperature monitoring and control. Critical benefits of IoT medical fridges include:
- Monitoring vaccine temperature & alerts for wasted vaccines
- Take vaccines to the people if people can’t reach vaccines
- Automating vaccine storage & dose dispensing
- Saving time for patient care with quick dispensing
- Intelligent inventory tracking for vaccine availability alerts
- Separate cartridges to follow secure storage protocols
- Tracking location of vaccine throughout the transportation
- IoT data collection and data analytics for vaccine usage insights
The collection of real-time data through sensors allows healthcare authorities to monitor the transport of vaccines. 24×7 monitoring of medications enables the organizations to ensure safer delivery and preservation of vaccines. In a case, if the vaccine faces tampering, expiration, or alteration, authorities can make sure to discard such drugs to avoid any health consequences.
Crucial Elements Of IoT Medical Fridges:
IoT medical fridges include a variety of technical components to serve various purposes. Firstly, these containers include temperature/thermocouple sensors to ensure that drugs are preserved at the right temperature. Additionally, some costly medical fridges have display-based HMI to monitor the fridge’s insides through a display. GPS trackers are also used to offer complete traceability to the medical authorities.
These containers may travel across cities or even countries. Therefore, cellular connectivity is an essential aspect of the communication of smart fridges. Besides these, there are other technological implementations that are useful for particular medicines/vaccines. Some examples include accelerometer, pressure, humidity, light sensor, and even fire alarms. Hence, the choice of ideal system architecture will depend on a particular shipment.
The most critical part of these systems is the secure & encrypted communication channel. The data from these IoT systems need encoding to ensure that no cyberattackers can hack into the communication channel. Following the communication channel, data storage and analytics allow the authorities to better observe the system performance and challenges. Like most IoT systems, IoT-enabled fridges can leverage mobile apps or web apps for remote monitoring purposes. Together, these different components could create an effective medical drug preservation solution.
Frozen Conclusion
IoT-enabled medical fridges illustrate how efficiently technologies can transform conventional operations. Conventional operations were not able to offer medication insights to the authorities. As such, they create a lot of uncertainty and gray areas. Furthermore, automation of digital systems ensures better quality assurance and staff productivity. However, there are a few potential threats to these implementations. Any breach of these systems’ data communication can result in severe loss. Adversaries can access confidential information and can leverage it for ill purposes.
Other than vaccines, one more booming area for smarter healthcare preservation is the transportation of biologics. Delicate biologics requires at most attention towards various parameters throughout the logistic. Biologics are expensive, therefore preserving them with smarter containers is worth the investment. Similarly, these healthcare authorities can avoid any financial loss with the help of better preservation. To summarize, IoT medical fridges aim to provide economical, safer, and enough medical resources for better healthcare.
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