How A Microsoft Partner Has Profited From IoT
Submitted by Lindsey O'Donnell on
How did you work with Weka to build an IoT solution to address these challenges?
Weka built the fridges itself and we built all the smarts to make it a smart fridge. So, sensors in the fridge talked to our software running on Raspberry Pi, a very small computer installed in the fridge and running Microsoft Azure – and tells [Azure] the current location, temperature, or whether anyone added a vaccine to the machine. We compile these telemetrics and send them to the cloud, and you can monitor the fridges from one dashboard.
So, say I'm in a village in Africa and I happen to have a Measles vaccine. Five miles down the road there's a patient who needs it, but that particular location doesn't have the vaccine. From my center console, not only can I see [that] I could send one down there, I can see it hasn't been compromised by temperature and [it hasn't reached its] expiration date yet. It's a great way to let doctors save money in general on vaccines, but also to track them better and save more lives, frankly.