With his new benchtop incubators, embryologist Dr Peter Hollands of Agora, was keen to remove the burden of taking manual readings of temperature and CO2 for his staff.
He contacted us about the ReAssure system to help manage this and, with a mind to later requirements, about status alerts, alarms and data handling for liquid nitrogen storage and other lab ware.
He was after a solution that could start small but expand - to alarm and monitor equipment and rooms in the labs, to store and access data compliantly and cascade alarms via audibles, phone calls, emails and SMS.
Since 2006 the Agora Centre has offered fertility, early pregnancy and female health services; the HFEA figures show its results to be comparable to some to the top IVF units in UK, indeed the world.
Agora offers a complete programme of assisted conception including follicle tracking, intrauterine insemination (IUI), in vitro fertilisation (IVF) and intra-cytoplasmic injection (ICSI).
Peter has worked as a Clinical Embryologist since 1985 and with his experience has particular interest in reliability. Initially he chose the system to monitor and alarm his BT37 incubators using independent temperature sensors. He used eight pt100 sensors - two in each benchtop. The clinic logs data for its own purposes as well as compliance.
Thresholds and alarm cascades are configurable according to the type of equipment or sensor and alarms are customisable according to the time of day and the days of the week. Also, equipment subject to maintenance can have a 'suppress alarm' feature applied. The ReAssure platform allows Administrator, Manager and User access and each role is associated with different access rights and privileges within the system. A 'watchdog' system which acts via a visual and audible alarm lets operators know if one aspect of the whole system is down - such as power or a LAN connection. The 'watchdog' can be connected to a GSM auto-dialler to make phone call alarms to up to nine people on a list.
ReAssure also has an option for cloud based storage of historical monitoring data and its associated context, including annotations and calibration records which includes a comprehensive audit trail. There are provisions to protect this information, including encryption and anonymisation. Analysis of historic data can also be useful to highlight potential future issues and with the cloud based storage option, users can review historical monitoring data over many months.
Dr Peter Hollands
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