Patent Application
20170352002
The present disclosure, in general, relates to a field of real time remote monitoring of atmospheric conditions within a particular region, and more particularly, relates to system and method for real time remote monitoring of atmospheric conditions of products in cold chains.
Many food safety regulations put an emphasis on mission critical monitoring areas such as proper cooking temperatures, holding temperatures, storage environment conditions, serving temperatures, environmental conditions during transit, and several other points that are required to maintain the quality of any perishable product.
Food producers, shippers, trucking companies, restaurants, and other commercial establishments know the risks associated with each phase of the food safety chain, and work together to streamline processes and procedures to meet compliance, preserve & maintain quality, and to protect consumers from bacteria or spoiled goods. Without proper monitoring of environmental condition with sensors, such as temperature, humidity, pressure, vibration, proximity and ambient light sensor and the like, during the transportation and storage, the chilled food, frozen food, medicine and vaccine may easily be spoiled.
In current practice, most monitoring systems uses a passive or standalone environment sensor logger. The records are retrieved when the goods have been delivered. It cannot provide a real-time status of controlled products. This current system is not enabled to provide the real-time status of food product while in transit. This may lead to a risk when the environmental condition in a container has surpassed a critical limit which may spoil the food. At such conditions, one is unaware that the food product inside the container has started to spoil and it is realized only when the transit is completed at a target location where the sensor's data is retrieved and analysed.
Maintaining an optimal temperature in the food storage coolers, freezers or containers allows one to keep the food fresh. If the temperature falls above or below the optimal range, costly spoilage may occur.
In one implementation, a system for remotely monitoring of atmospheric conditions of one or more products is described. The system may comprise one or more data loggers for sensing and broadcasting atmospheric data associated with one or more products stored in one or more containers, wherein each of the one or more data loggers may be adapted to broadcast the atmospheric data at a predefined time slot. The system may further comprise one or more data collectors for capturing the atmospheric data via a wireless connection established between the one or more data loggers and the one or more data collectors, wherein the one or more data collectors may be configured to synchronize time stamp of each of the data logger with a time stamp of the one or more data collectors. The system may further comprise a server connectively coupled with one or more data collectors over a network, wherein the server may be enabled to obtain the atmospheric data of the one or more containers. Further, the server may transmit the atmospheric data to one or more user devices in communication with the server thereby facilitating real time monitoring of atmospheric conditions of the one or more products within the one or more containers.
In another implementation, a method for remotely monitoring atmospheric conditions of one or more products is described. The method may comprise sensing, via one or more data loggers, atmospheric data associated with one or more products stored in one or more containers, wherein each of the one or more data loggers may be adapted to broadcast the atmospheric data at a predefined time slot. The method may further comprise capturing, via one or more data collectors, the atmospheric data via a wireless connection established between the one or more data loggers and the one or more data collectors, wherein the data collector may be configured to synchronize time stamp of each of the data loggers with a time stamp of the data collector. The method may further comprise enabling the one or more data collectors to connect with a server over a network wherein the server may be enabled to obtain the atmospheric data of the one or more container. Further, the server may transmit the atmospheric data to one or more user devices in communication with the server thereby facilitating real time monitoring of atmospheric conditions of the one or more products within the one or more containers.
The present disclosure relates to the field of food chain monitoring at a plurality of situations and more particularly to a system and method for real time remote monitoring of atmospheric conditions of products.
The present application employs a Bluetooth Low Energy technology in data logger especially for its ability for consuming less power. Furthermore, almost all the communication devices comprising a smart phone, a tablet or a smart gadget have a wireless connection protocol comprising the GSM network, CDMA network, Infrared connection, Wi-fi network and Bluetooth connectivity. The BLE technology being an energy efficient and fast in responsiveness may simplify the system infrastructure and it may provide a simple process for the operator to check the products' status.
The real time remote monitoring system may comprise a data logger, a data collector, a user device and other auxiliary devices. The devices are implemented in the real time remote monitoring system to keep track of product temperature, humidity and expiry date. By using wireless communication protocols, more particularly, the Bluetooth Low energy (BLE) technology, different types of mobile devices may easily check the corresponding product status.
Referring to
In an embodiment, the data logger 101 may include two Light Emitting Diodes (LEDs) 103, green and red. Further, the data logger 101 may include a barcode 104 containing Bluetooth address associated with the data logger 101. The LEDs 103 may be enabled to indicate statuses of the data logger 101 as listed in Table 1 below.
In one embodiment, the features or the hardware specifications of the data logger 101 may be those as depicted in table 2 below.
Now referring to
In an embodiment, the features or the hardware specifications of the data collector 201 may be those as depicted in table 3-4 below. The data collector 201 may comprise a main unit and an antenna unit.
Specification of the main part is as provided in the Table 3 below:
Further, the Specification of the Antenna part is as provided in Table 4 below:
Referring to
The association process may include scanning of the bar code 104 pertaining to the data logger 101 and food packing. The user device 301 (also to be referred as “industrial tablet”), based upon scanning of the bar code 104, may identify the Bluetooth address of the data logger 101 and thereby initiate a Bluetooth connection with the data logger 101 to send configuration settings and system time to the data logger 101. After the association process, the data logger 101 may initiate the process of monitoring of the atmospheric conditions.
Referring to
At step 404, the data collector 201 may be installed in a truck so as to continue to monitor the temperature information during transportation. The information may be sent out by a 3G/4G communication network.
At step 405, the centralized server 408 may communicate with each of the data collector 201 to retrieve the temperature information for all the trays or containers 102. The operators may access the temperature information through their user devices. The server 408 may analyze the product status automatically and provide appropriate notification alerts on the user devices associated with the operators.
At step 406, a final stage is a check-out process which is executed when the product leaves the container 102. The data logger 101 may disable the temperature logging function and switch to the OFF mode. The one or more tray(s) containing the products may be returned to reuse for the next lot of products. Thereafter, at step 407, the product which is transported safely is reheated or recooked for serving purpose.
Referring to
OFF mode (501)—In this state, the data logger 101 may be switched off and further may be activated by operating the power key.
Association mode (502)—In this state, the data logger 101 is waiting for the Bluetooth connection. The data logger 101 may start an operation after receiving the configuration information from the industrial tablet 301.
Idle mode (503)—In this state, the data logger 101 may check the temperature sensor reading and store it to the serial memory periodically. If a power key is depressed, the data logger 101 may switch to a check-out mode (504).
Check out mode (504)—In this state, the data logger 101 is waiting for the Bluetooth connection. Further, the data logger 101 may stop the operation after receiving the OFF command.
Temperature read mode (505)—In this state, the data logger 101 may obtain one temperature record.
Peripheral configurable mode (506)—In this state, the data logger 101 may compose eight temperature records and check the battery level. Further, the data logger 101 may use advertising channels to send the temperature information.
Bluetooth connected mode (507)—In this state, the data logger 101 may be connected to the server 408. The server 408 may be enabled to issue READ command to get the dedicated temperature records.
Update system time mode (508)—In this state, the server 408 passes the time information to the data logger 101 for synchronization purpose.
Retrieve temperature log mode—In this state, the data collector 201 may send the temperature records to the server 408.
Now referring to
OFF mode (601)—In this state, the data collector 201 may be switched OFF and may be activated by operating the power key.
Standby mode (602)—In this state, the data collector 201 is waiting for the WIFI/3G connection. Further, the data collector 201 may initialize operation after receiving the configuration information.
Idle mode (603)—In this state, the data collector 201 may be scanning the advertising packet from the data logger 101, arranging the time synchronization and uploading the temperature records to the back-end server 408 periodically.
Reporting data to Host mode (604)—In this state, the data collector 201 may be uploading the temperature records to the back-end server 408.
Time synchronization mode (605)—In this state, the data collector 201 may be sending the time information to the data logger 101.
Retrieve advertising log mode (606)—In this state, the data collector 201 may utilize three Bluetooth modules to scan the advertising packets from each of the data logger 101 in same area.
In accordance with aspects of the present subject matter, a Bluetooth BLE time slot for each BLE device is described herein. In one embodiment, a Time Division Duplex scheme may define each Bluetooth time slot to 625 μs in length. The BLE advertising packet transmission time may be less than 625 μs. Therefore, to send the advertising packets in all three advertising channels, the required time is around 1.875 ms (625 μs×3).
In accordance with aspects of the present subject matter, the BLE advertising and the corresponding data channel indexes are described herein. In one embodiment, there are thirty-seven data channels and three advertising channels defined in Bluetooth 4.0. The channel allocation is listed in the below table 5.
In accordance with aspects of the present subject matter, the advertising packet of the data logger 101 is described herein. In one embodiment, the advertising packet may contain thirty-seven bytes of data. The first six bytes may be reserved for Bluetooth address, the usage of other thirty-one bytes may not be mandatory. The present application defines the advertising packet for the data logger 101 as shown in table 6 below.
In one embodiment, each advertising packet may include seven historical temperature records and latest record summing up a total of eight records. Such packet format design allows the data collector 201 to receive only one packet for eight consecutive packets without losing temperature records.
Now referring to
Referring to
In accordance with aspects of the present subject matter, a time re-synchronization for each of the data logger 101 is described herein for facilitating collision avoidance. After receiving the system clock from the industrial tablet, the data logger 101 may use the internal clock to determine a time to send the advertising packet. The clock in the data logger 101 may have a limited accuracy which may not be similar to the system clock accuracy thereby resulting in the clock drift problem. This clock drift destroys the time synchronized mechanism and therefore a packet collision may be resulted. In order to align the system time between the data logger 101 and the data collector 201, two different approaches/methods may be implemented in the data collector 201 to handle the time re-synchronization.
In the first approach/method, the data collector 201 may broadcast the time stamp every multiple seconds. Such broadcasting may enable each of the data logger 101 to receive the time stamp and then update their system time. Such an update ensures that the time between the data collector 201 and each of the data logger 101 is synchronized.
In the second approach/method, the data collector 201 may analyse the time stamp of the advertising packets received from each of the data logger 101. If data collector 201 observes that the clock drift has a trend to an upper limit, the data collector 201 may re-synchronize the time of at least one of the data logger 101.
Now referring to
Now referring to
In an embodiment, there may be two conditions resulting in the occurrence of the congestion time slot. The first condition is duplication of a time slot identifier (ID). The advertising packet from each data logger 101 may include the time slot ID. If the data collector 201 receives the same time slot ID from two devices, such condition indicates the duplication of time slot ID. Whereas, the second condition indicates a condition wherein more than ten data loggers 101 are found in ten-time slot duration. Assuming each time slot of 30 ms is assigned for one data logger 101, if the data collector 201 receives more than ten data loggers 101 information every 300 ms, the utilization is greater than 100% and hence resulting in the congestion.
In one embodiment, based upon detection of the congestion, the data collector 201 may establish a Bluetooth connection to relocate and/or re-assign the devices to an idle time slot thereby facilitating dynamic/real-time time slot allocation for the devices in case of collision/congestion. Based upon the relocation/re-assignment, the channel allocation table may be updated in form of new table 9 as below. As depicted in table 9 below, the congested devices are moved to idle time slot such as 51 and 53 respectively.
The dynamic timeslot allocation therefore may resolve the congestion problem by re-allocating particular data logger 101 from congestion slot to the idle time slot. This dynamic timeslot allocation may be implemented by the local BLE data collector for small scale implementation. For the large-scale implementation that includes multiple production centres and multiple warehouses, a plenty of sensor data may be obtained. All the data collector 201 may be connected to a centralized computing device to implement the aforementioned dynamic time slot allocation.
Referring to
Now referring to
As shown, at step 1301, the data logger 101 and the data collector 201 may be located in a same area (e.g. a warehouse). The data logger 101 may receive the time synchronization packet from the data collector 201.
At step 1302, if the regular based time synchronization packet is received, the data logger 101 may continue to broadcast the sensors data.
At step 1303, when the data logger 101 is moved outside the RF coverage area of the data collector 201 after missing time synchronization packets for several times, the data logger 101 may be switched to airplane mode and the sensors data may be recorded in a local non-volatile memory.
At step 1304, the data logger may record the received sensor data into the memory of the data logger. Such recording of the sensor data may be either when the sensor data is broadcasted or when the airplane mode is switched off from the ON state.
When the data logger 101 moves to another warehouse 1001, data logger 101 may receive the time synchronization packet from another data collector 201. The data logger 101 may disable the airplane mode automatically and start to broadcast the sensors data.
Although implementations for system and method remotely monitoring of atmospheric conditions of one or more products have been described in language specific to structural features and/or methods, it is to be understood that the appended claims are not necessarily limited to the specific features or methods described. Rather, the specific features and methods are disclosed as examples of implementations remotely monitoring of atmospheric conditions of one or more products.
The present application claims priority from U.S. Provisional Patent Application No. 62/344,376 dated Jun. 1, 2016, the entirety of which is incorporated herein by a reference.
| Number | Date | Country | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 62344376 | Jun 2016 | US |
