How to Improve Cold Chain Monitoring with LoRaWAN?
If you are looking for a solution to monitor the cold chain of your products, LoRaWAN technology offers the appropriate functionalities to improve the quality of your supply processes.
Cold chain monitoring is a process that ensures the quality and safety of food and medicine. This is achieved by controlling and monitoring their temperature during transport. It is a critical process, since an unwanted temperature variation can spoil a product. Therefore, cold chain monitoring is essential to ensure that perishable products, such as food or medicine, are kept within a temperature range suitable for them.
In this post, we will explain why monitoring the cold chain is important, the key elements of it, and how it can be improved thanks to LoRaWAN technology.
What is Cold Chain Monitoring?
It is a process that consists of collecting the temperature of the products during their transport in order to have total traceability of it. This process ensures that food, pharmaceutical, or other perishable products remain within the appropriate temperature range. Monitoring is key to ensuring that products do not spoil or, even worse, that their consumption is not dangerous to health. There are many factors that can affect the quality of a product during transport, such as temperature, humidity, exposure to light, etc. Cold chain monitoring allows controlling these variables and ensuring that the products remain in the appropriate ranges.
Why is it Important to Monitor the Cold Chain?
The main reason is to maintain the quality and safety of the products. Any deviation from the desired temperature can affect the quality and safety levels of the products. Monitoring the cold chain is vital to keep this parameter within the appropriate range.
What are the Key Elements in the Cold Chain?
There are key phases: transport, storage, distribution, and packaging. For cold chain monitoring to be effective, it must be implemented in each of these stages. A cold chain monitoring system usually consists of a series of sensors that measure and store the temperature of the products during transport. The sensors are connected to a central database that can be accessed by suppliers, customers, or involved third parties.
What Type of Sensors are Used?
There are many types of devices on the market capable of monitoring the cold chain. Among them: dataloggers, wireless sensors, and GPS geolocation devices. LoRaWAN technology is an increasingly used wireless communication technology for this type of project. It offers several advantages over “traditional” wireless technologies, such as a greater coverage range, low sensor consumption, and high scalability.
Sensors with LoRaWAN technology can be placed inside refrigerated trucks, in warehouses with cold storage, and in distribution centers to continuously monitor the temperature of the products. This information can be transmitted to a centralized database that can be accessed by authorized personnel.
LoRaWAN technology offers a wide coverage range, a longer battery life, and minimal energy consumption, which makes it an ideal solution for monitoring the cold chain. By placing sensors with LoRaWAN technology in trucks, warehouses, and distribution centers, complete traceability of the temperature of the products is achieved, thus ensuring that they remain within the appropriate range for consumption.
If you are looking for a solution to monitor the cold chain of your products, LoRaWAN technology offers the appropriate functionalities to improve the quality of your supply processes. Contact us and we will explain how we can improve your cold chain with LoRaWAN technology.
