Customer
The customer is a medical equipment maintenance company that provides vital medical gases for patient ventilation and various clinical applications (oxygen to provide life support, compressed air to power surgical equipment, nitrous oxide for anesthesia, carbon dioxide for insufflation during surgery, vacuum to supports suction equipment) in public hospitals.
Challenge
The medical gas pipeline system is one of the key elements of every hospital. This system must be fully compliant with applicable regulatory requirements and operate with the best efficiency, creating the safest possible environment for patient care. Some of the gases are classified as pharmaceuticals and must meet strict regulatory standards.
The hospital equipment maintenance provider must constantly verify that the system is operating safely, as required by the reference documents, make reasonable adjustments to optimal performance and also provide on-call emergency services for malfunctioning equipment. For safety purposes, medical gas pipeline equipment must be serviced by trained and qualified personnel and should work around the clock.
To ensure comprehensive service, avoid time-consuming visual inspections, reduce the costs of maintenance, the customer decided to build a monitoring system of medical gas pipeline equipment. The customer requested a proof of concept of the monitoring system based on open-source software.
Solution
We agreed the architecture of the IoT system based on open source instruments for data acquisition, storage and visualization. The implementation took about 2 months.
The system includes back-end, front-end, and embedded software for the edge devices. Our solution allows the customer to collect and display data from up to 500 controllers with a frequency of 10-100 Hz. Each edge device supports a connection to 32 sensors. Received data is stored in the database for future analysis (retention period 1 year).
System operators and repair teams connect to the system at a time using a PC or mobile phone. Communication is provided by two channels (fixed line and GSM) for system reliability. In case of problems with a fixed line, the data is sent via GSM channel.
Our IoT solution ensures a secure connection of gas monitor devices to central supervision system, which enables collection of all data (including alarm messages) from medical gas pipeline equipment and distribution of this information to the relevant specialists and organizations.
System capabilities:
• Collecting and displaying data from devices in real-time mode with specified frequency;
• Web interface with multilevel location objects on the map (country -> city -> hospital -> floor -> device);
• The system of the filters to find a particular hospital or device;
• Scalability. A possibility of adding new devices using the MQTT protocol;
• Configurable alarm subsystem (state of devices, sensors threshold);
• Saving data from devices into the database with specified retention period and frequency;
• Building chart and reports based on historical data.
Technology stack:
• Web server – GO, HTML5, CSS, JQuery, Infragistics;
• M2M protocol – MQTT, Mosquitto broker;
• Database – MongoDB;
• Device – implemented MQTT protocol (STM32 microcontroller);
• Security – openSSL, PolarSSL.
Results
The customer can monitor a status of medical gas supply systems in a network of public hospitals, allowing maintenance and repair to be punctual and less expensive.
Features:
• Geographically distributed devices;
• Lightweight M2M protocol to collect data from devices;
• Security protocols to protect the transmission channels;
• Storing the real-time data for future analysis;
• Web interface to display real-time data;
• Alarm subsystem;
• GSM 3G and SMS service;
• Built using open source instruments.
