Industry's first Wi-Fi cold storage monitor

BANGALORE, INDIA: GainSpan Corp., an Intel spin-off and a technology innovator and leader in Wi-Fi semiconductor and software solutions has announced the availability of industry’s first Wi-Fi cold storage monitor that provides up to five to 10 years of battery life.

SentinelPro, the product brought out by Aginova Inc., a manufacturer of specialized wireless subsystems is based on GainSpan's ultra-low power GS1010 Wi-Fi SoC.

Leveraging the existing ubiquitous Wi-Fi network, the new solution offers the most advanced Wi-Fi sensing hardware, a portable alarm unit, and a comprehensive software package for monitoring, reporting, and storing of critical storage condition data over time.

With SentinelPro, authorized personnel can view precise data over enterprise class security links, and provide alerts in the event that environmental conditions vary beyond a specified range. The system can page, email and visually alert any computer screen whenever food, lab samples, pharmaceuticals or other temperature sensitive items are outside prescribed parameters.

Utilizing Wi-Fi for temperature monitoring enables a cost effective way to improve patient care and maintain regulatory compliance while providing automated and detailed reports on any piece of equipment for any time period for JCAHO, AOA, CAP, FDA, USDA or the Health Department. In addition, it can also provide temperature logs, operating parameters, alarms and corrective actions to be taken while eliminating human error and the cost of manual temperature documentation.

Vijay Parmar, CEO, GainSpan said: "Wireless sensor networks have seen steady growth over the past few years and the market for it has immense potential. GainSpan’s solutions are designed to support broad range of embedded applications thus enabling customers to customise to their product needs. This solution is a great example of that flexibility as it has been possible to develop a product around GainSpan’s offering exactly addressing the need of the food and cold storage industry for more scientific and accurate monitoring and controlling of temperature."

Ashok Sabata, CEO, Aginova Inc., added: "We were using Zigbee, a non-standard wireless communications protocol, but with GainSpan we've been able to develop and get products to market much more quickly than ever before. And, because we're tapping into the existing infrastructure, installing and maintaining our products is relatively cheap-we've cut costs exponentially."

The temperature monitoring products are available, depending on the quantity and temperature range. The software, developed by Aginova, is available in two packages: enterprise grade for integration into a customer's automation system or as a service running on Aginova secure servers. As a result, the new temperature monitoring solution provides the security, manageability, convenience and benefits of Wi-Fi along with five to 10 years of extended battery life.