Researchers at the Weill Cornell Medical College in Qatar, a branch of the Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City, conduct a wide range of biomedical research projects focused on everything from diabetes to cancer. Key to the success of these studies is ensuring that biological samples and temperature-sensitive agents are kept in a stable environment—a job that falls on Harald Moubarak, the college’s research laboratory manager, and his team.
“We manage the lab so the researchers can focus on the research,” Moubarak explains. “So we do the cleaning, providing equipment; we maintain the culture rooms, make sure the plumbing is working properly, etc. We also conduct safety checks and manage equipment.”
Yet, there is only so much Moubarak and his team can do to ensure that the research efforts are well supported. Without assigning personnel to monitor the lab 24 hours a day, for example, he was unable to ensure that all equipment would function properly at all times.
In the event of an overnight power outage or equipment failure, vital equipment such as CO2 incubators (designed to maintain a temperature- and humidity-controlled carbon dioxide atmosphere for the growth of tissue culture cells) or liquid nitrogen storage tanks could be knocked offline. “You could come to work in the morning,” he explains, “and find that years of research is gone because the storage or incubation system was not working at night.”
Seeking a technological solution, Moubarak put out requests for proposals (RFPs) for a sensor network that could act as eyes and ears, monitoring vital lab equipment and alerting staff members electronically any time that power was disrupted.
The RFP required that the solution be completely wireless—this would make installation more straightforward, Moubarak explains, and help him avoid bringing the IT department in to run cable. The sensors would also need to be able to run on battery power so that they could operate in the event of power-line outages.
Moubarak found what he was looking for from a French company called Oceasoft, and since late 2012, the Qatar college’s life-sciences labs have been using the company’s wireless sensors for a variety of applications. The sensors are placed inside freezers and incubators, but also within rooms that house important lab equipment, such as mass spectrometry and genetic analyzers and sequencers, and where blood samples and other critical goods are stored. Moubarak is also using a Bluetooth-based mobile tracking system from Oceasoft, known as Emerald, to track shipments of biological samples that the lab ships to other labs around the world.
To ensure that the ultra-low-temperature freezers (which can be set as low as -80 degrees Celsius [-112 degrees Fahrenheit]) remain at or near their set temperatures, and to monitor CO2 incubators—which are key equipment for biological experiments, since they maintain the optimal temperature, humidity and mix of carbon dioxide and oxygen needed to cultivate cells—the lab has installed a range of Oceasoft wireless sensors. These sensors are all part of the company’s Cobalt 2 family of sensors, which have the same basic form factor and functions, such as transmitting data across the Industrial Scientific Medical (ISM) radio band (868 MHz in Europe and 915 MHz in North America), with a signal range of 25 to 100 meters (82 to 328 feet), sufficient onboard memory to store 3,000 measurements and a 3.6-volt lithium battery with a four-year operational lifespan.
The Cobalt 2 unit contains a single internal sensor for measuring ambient temperatures—10 to 50 degrees Celsius (50 degrees to 122 degrees Fahrenheit)—but it can accommodate external temperature sensors that can read tags in environments as low as -100 degrees Celsius (-148 degrees Celsius) or as high as +350 degrees Celsius (+662 degrees Fahrenheit). Another external sensor measures pressure levels. External sensors that measure both temperature and humidity levels, or temperature and CO2, are also available.
Oceasoft’s Cobalt T, with a combination external sensor for tracking light, temperature and relative humidity, is used inside rooms that house live animals, where the lights are set to closely mimic the day and night cycles that the animals would experience in natural environments. If test animals experience light, temperature or humidity levels outside set parameters, this could impact the results of experiments for which they are being used.
All told, 170 Oceasoft sensors are installed throughout the lab. Whenever conditions inside any piece of monitored laboratory equipment or within the animal labs fall outside of set parameters for temperature, humidity, CO2 or light, the Oceasoft sensors detect the anomaly and issue an alert to the nearest Oceasoft receiver, which then sends it to Oceasoft software that manages the sensor network, via an Ethernet link to the lab’s computer network. The software forward alerts to Moubarak, as well as to his staff members and/or researchers using the lab. The means by which alerts are sent depends on the time and day, Moubarak explains.
“Say lab A has a -80 C freezer and there is a power failure and so the temperature starts rising,” Moubarak says. “The system can be configured to [send an alert] when the interior of the freezer reaches -60 and remains there for 10 minutes. Then the system will trigger an alarm to the [person in charge of that freezer].” This alert can come in the form of a phone call with a pre-recorded message, which the recipient acknowledges by hitting the star key. If the Oceasoft software does not receive such a confirmation (which likely means the message had gone to voice mail), it could then trigger an SMS text message and/or an e-mail alert to the same or different recipient(s). Phone calls, texts or e-mails can be configured per day and time period. For example, during weekdays when the lab is populated with researchers and support staff, e-mails and SMS texts are a sufficient way to send an alert, whereas a phone call, followed by a text and then an e-mail are more appropriate for alerts triggered during a weekend or holiday.
The Oceasoft receivers are powered over Ethernet, but are also linked to the lab’s uninterrupted power supply (UPS), on which they can run for five hours in the event of a power failure.
Moubarak says the sensors have certainly kept experiments on track, by triggering alerts on multiple occasions when room temperatures have fallen outside set parameters or when equipment has failed. The researchers can also download the sensors’ data logs, enabling them to go back and study the environmental conditions to which samples or animals were exposed throughout the course of an experiment—even if those variations were not extreme enough to trigger alerts.
“Oceasoft is a small company, but they really listened to our feedback,” Moubarak states. “And because you’re buying from the manufacturer, you can suggest ways to improve the software and make modifications to the product offerings.”
Late last year, Oceasoft announced a new sensor, the Cobalt 3S, containing a radio module made by French firm Sigfox. The module supports long-range communication—up to 40 kilometers (24.9 miles) outdoors—but at a low data throughput. The Cobalt 3S is more suitable for applications such as environmental monitoring than for tracking conditions inside a life-sciences lab, Oceasoft’s CEO Laurent Rousseau told IOT Journal at that time. According to Rousseau, Oceasoft will continue to manufacture the Cobalt 2 sensor line.