This past April we had an exclusive interview with Jeremy and Ajay Rane, VP, Business Development at Sigfox where we learned the company is using IoT devices to not only track vaccines and their temperatures but also to provide call buttons in make-shift hospitals.
Technology is helping society a great deal when dealing with the pandemic. It is why the Pandemic Tech Alliance was launched… To foster the pandemic tech community and ensure solutions are promoted and adopted by society.
In a recent article from Dima Feldman and Aviv Castro, VP Product & Marketing, and VP Business Development, both at Altair Semiconductor the authors discuss how global asset tracking can help with shipping heat-sensitive chemicals and items like fresh fruit and produce.
Ambient temperature, lighting and humidity sensors ensure food, vaccines and other items can be tracked throughout their journey from producer to end-customer.
The challenges of designing devices that are able to last months or years, requires low-power ICs. Likewise, incorporating cellular connectivity with a global reach, while maintaining attractive connectivity plans, a hardware-based SIM solution is needed for connectivity to be able to connect to tier1 mobile networks globally. Size is also a necessary aspect of any asset tracker. Not only does it need to be extremely robust, but it also needs to be small enough to be attached to small assets, beer kegs for an example.
Design engineers faced with this development task would find the Altair’s cellular IoT chipset – ALT1250 system-on-chip, a viable contender on which to base their design. This highly integrated device, housed in an ultra-thin WLCS package, features both CAT-M and NB-IoT modems, a dedicated low power Arm Cortex-M4 microcontroller for running the application code, a GNSS receiver, and an integrated SIM (iSIM). When it comes to designing an asset tracker, it doesn’t get much simpler than this.
Technology is here to help. Whether it is getting food to people stuck in their homes or ensuring stored medicines are kept at the right temperature, we are fortune this pandemic has taken place at a time when technology has made it far easier to manage.
In future pandemics, we can expect these solutions to be even better.
Until then, stay safe.
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