The GE Kaye LabWatch LT System, from GE Measurement & Control, offers a cost-effective solution to monitor environmental parameters within the biotechnology, medical and pharmaceutical sectors in compliance with regulatory requirements. It is a wireless system, featuring very simple hardware and software and is particularly suitable for small to medium size companies, which do not have the need or the budget to justify a full-scale SCADA system.
“To comply with regulations such as FDA and GMP, it is essential that any monitoring system provides accurate and reliable monitoring of a wide range of parameters ranging from temperature, pressure and humidity to door switch relays and air flows,” explains Mark De Novellis, Global Product Manager at GE Measurement & Control. “Based on user-defined parameters, Kaye LabWatch will monitor and detect system excursions and can alert user-selected personnel wherever they are located. It will also create an audit trail of alarms and generate compliant reports. All this is carried out in real time by means of a user-friendly software platform, which is integrated with accurate wireless data loggers, seamlessly connected using GE’s highly reliable SmartMesh networking technology.”
The primary inputs of the new system are the extremely accurate, battery-operated, wireless RF ValProbe data loggers. These store and forward the real-time data form the parameter sensors at user-defined intervals to the RF Base Stations and can store up to 10,000 samples per sensor.
Data is then transferred from the base stations to the local Ethernet network or USB2.0 and then accessed by the LabWatch LT system computer for processing and analysis.
LabWatch LT is relatively simple to install and engineering costs have been minimised as the software is designed to be configured by a user with basic IT skills and the installation of the RF Logger hardware requires no wiring. Operator training is easy because of the system’s intuitive operation.
LabWatch LT makes use of wireless sensors that adds lot of simplification while installation but before you choose any wireless you should always look for the points to get data reliability and data security, as in pharma industry data is very critical and loss of it not acceptable.
The wireless technology
The mesh technology permits nodes to communicate with the base station and each other, correcting for weak RF links and automatically ad-justing to dynamic RF environment, e.g. a forklift truck driving into a warehouse blocking a signal. No special knowledge or expertise is required to install or operate the Kaye RF ValProbe. Smart-Mesh Network
Key features
- Transmission reliability: RF Mesh can provide up to 99.9 per cent transmission reliability. Redundancy introduced through data-storage elimi-nates risks of data loss.
- Dynamic network formation: No RF Site surveys required. System works out of the box and is fully validatable.
- Low energy consumption
Data security: Immune to RF interference, snooping, insertion of invalid data.
Transmission reliability
For the application in a GMP environment a wire-less sensor network needs to deliver wire-like transmission reliability. The Dust Networks SmartMesh is based on a time slotted channel hopping protocol (TSCH). The IEEE 802.15.4 provides 16 wireless transmission channels which are divided into different time slots. Each channel and each timeslot can be used for data packet transmission. Because of the manager coordinated network synchronisation each sensor nodes always listens, talks or goes into sleep mode in time and always uses the best possible available channel for data transmission avoiding any possible interference.
Even pair wise channel hopping is possible enabling multiple simultaneous transmissions and further increasing reliability by increasing the available channels for each sensor node.
Basically the time slotted channel hopping technique renders the transmission quite robust to interferences from other wireless device transmissions like cordless phones or WLAN connections and electric fields created by electric motors.
Low energy consumption
In monitoring or mapping applications the possibility to place a sensor in a remote and difficult to reach location is a benefit of wireless sensor net-works. Often a power line is not available. For a wireless sensor node most power is required by the data transmission. Common wireless transmission protocols require either a connection to the power line or frequent exchange of the batteries. In a Dust Networks SmartMesh the communication of the sensor nodes is reduced to a minimum using the time synchronised protocol advantages. In addition Dust Networks has developed a very low power consuming IEEE 802.15.4 compliant hardware. The combination of the low power optimised communication and the low power consuming hardware leads to sensor nodes that can run easily a year or longer on battery power while contin-uously monitoring the environment. The power consumption of the sensor node is monitored, too. Therefore the managing system can dynamically optimise the battery life by re-routing data transmission through neighbor sensor modes if available, and the system will report the end of lifetime for a battery for duly replacement.
Dynamic network formation
The Dust Networks SmartMesh network is self-forming and self-optimising. Each of the nodes discover neighbours, measure RF signal strength, optimise signal pathways, dynamically optimise signal routing and route signal traffic from neighbours.
A node may also join as an end node, become a routing node due to changing RF conditions and later revert back to an end node. The SmartMesh network manager performs a continuous optimisation of the transmission routing and changes the data pathways and allocate bandwidth in response of the dynamic changes in the RF environment. The extension of a SmartMesh sensor network is simple. The manager automatically discovers new sensor nodes and implement them into the existing network. Extending the network increases the optimisation possibilities and actually improves reliability and data latency times.
Data security
The Dust SmartMesh network provides full end to end data encryption (128bit XTEA) with pre-shared keys on RF level while checking data mes-sage integrity and authentication. Each sensor node is handled like an independent network device with a MAC address.
The data inside the loggers and the basestation is encrypted and all files that are transferred to a PC is CFR 21 part 11 compliant hashed and digitally signed. All RF data is encrypted using a join key and a network key. These security features render the Dust Smart- Mesh network to one of the most secure networks available.
Contact Details:
Asif Gavandi
Sales Manager-India & Bangladesh
Email: Asif.gavandi@ge.com