Life and Death: How ± Degree Can Break the Cold Chain

When it’s a matter of life or death, the holy grail of 100% connectivity isn’t just a nice-to-have. 

Storing medical materials, human tissue, vaccines and embryos requires very cold, stable conditions. Monitoring the containers with these material is essential — and there’s no shortcut.

Thankfully, IoT empowers industry-leading environmental monitoring companies like PharmaWatch to innovate for clients and patients and make solutions more broadly available. 

PharmaWatch Vice President of Sales Fred Roe joins the podcast to offer insight into how IoT is shaping the healthcare and pharmaceutical industries, including:

• Why tiny increments matter so much to environmental monitoring
• How PharmaWatch went from Wi-Fi to Eseye’s cellular connectivity in its quest for the holy grail
• How Eseye’s AnyNet SMARTconnect™ performed during the 2022 Rogers outage

Tune in to learn more about how device intelligence is evolving to offer healthcare organisations big wins.

Subscribe to IoT Leaders

Subscribe now

Subscribe now

Subscribe now

Transcript

Intro:
You’re listening to IoT Leaders, a podcast from Eseye that shares real IoT stories from the field about digital transformation swings and misses, lessons learned and innovation strategies that work. In each episode, you’ll hear our conversations with top digitization leaders on how IoT is changing the world for the better. Let IoT Leaders be your guide to IoT, digital transformation, and innovation. Let’s get into the show.

Nick Earle: 
Hi, this is Nick Earle, CEO of Eseye and welcome to the IoT Leaders podcast. We’re in the field of healthcare again this week. And in particular we’re going to be talking about life or death, not of patients, but of medical materials. Human tissue, embryos. How do you ensure that you can meet the regulations in terms of vaccine, how are the regulations changing, and how does IoT enable all of that? 

My guest this week is Fred Roe. Fred is the SVP of sales for a very interesting US-based company called PharmaWatch, based in, as you’ll hear, Boise, Idaho. They are one of the leaders, if not the leader, in the area of a human tissue monitoring and vaccine monitoring. And in particular, they are the leader in the IVF, in vitro fertilisation field, where monitoring things like the temperature or air pressure or other physical characteristics of the containers that store this material is absolutely essential to whether or not the process is viable. Think of embryos, if you get it wrong, it is literally a life or death type situation for those embryos. 

So it’s a very, very important field. Fred’s got a great story to tell. And not only that, it’s the first time we’ve had a case study of our new AnyNet SMARTconnect™ capabilities, which you’ll hear in the podcast actually puts the switching logic into the device. And Fred’s got a great story of how they were the best performing company when Rogers had the, unfortunately, had the 19-hour outage in Canada, and how Fred’s devices were not affected by that. 

I think it’s a great podcast. It’s really interesting and it’s yet another in the theme of healthcare and the innovation that’s going on there around the movement towards continuous monitoring, which is a theme of all of these podcasts. So enough of me, let’s get going with my podcast with Fred Roe of PharmaWatch. Fred, welcome to the IoT Leaders podcast. 

Fred Roe: 
Thank you so much, Nick. 

Nick Earle: 
Great to have you. And I know you got a great story, you and your company PharmaWatch, that you work for, have got a really great story in multiple parts. But before we get into it, let’s do the who is Fred and what does he do part of the podcast. Maybe you can introduce yourself, what your role is, and then we’ll get into what the company does. 

Fred Roe: 
Great. My name is Fred Roe. I’m the Vice President of Sales for PharmaWatch, so I lead the sales team. I also have an engineering background, varied background that includes industrial monitoring and cellular connectivity. And so this was just the right place for me. 

Nick Earle: 
Great. And most people listen to this podcast, just listen to it, and some people watch it on YouTube. So for those of you watching on YouTube, you’ll see Fred has got a beautiful picture of some hills behind your head. That gives me the opportunity to ask you, I know that’s a virtual picture, I know you’re not outside, but what is the picture that we’re looking at? 

Fred Roe: 
This is the Boise Foothills. PharmaWatch is headquartered in Boise, Idaho. And so what you’re looking at there is the Boise Foothills. We are on the edge of a High Plains desert and the edge of the mountains, and so right through those clouds there are the mountains right behind the Foothills. 

Nick Earle: 
Great. All right. Okay, great. Boise, Idaho. So this is in the healthcare space, this week’s podcast, and PharmaWatch I know is a very exciting company that’s doing some really cool stuff. Again, just to explain to everyone who perhaps haven’t heard of you, what does the company do? What are the main lines of business? 

Fred Roe: 
We service the healthcare industry. And what we do is remote continuous monitoring of environmental conditions, and alerting if those conditions go outside a range that’s required by the user. 

Nick Earle: 
To make it real, give me a couple of examples of some use cases. 

Fred Roe: 
Yeah. Yeah, so we work with hospitals, with clinics, with anyone that is in a very broad healthcare industry. And so if you, for instance, need to keep a pharmaceutical or human tissue, any sort of material under controlled conditions, or even say an operating room and you need to keep the air clean inside, so you need to maintain a differential pressure between the inside and the outside to make sure you have no unfiltered air coming in, any sort of environmental conditions that you need to control and you need to monitor, that’s what we help you do. We help you monitor those, set up the limits for what’s okay and what’s not. Let you know 24 hours a day how those conditions are and if they are trending out of range. 

Nick Earle: 
So your customers are I guess the clinics, but also because, obviously full disclosure, you’re a customer of ours and that’s why we invited you on because we’re going to get into some really cool stuff. But I also know you’ve done a lot with … Talking about, you’ve used the word “need” a lot, and of course it really is a need. It’s not a nice-to-have, it’s a need because I know that you, for instance, have done a lot in vaccine distribution. 

Fred Roe: 
Yes. 

Nick Earle: 
And where we hear the stories of the last two, three years about things like the Pfizer vaccine, for instance, I remember when it was introduced, and they talked about the temperature it had to be kept at. And that’s the sort of area you get involved in. And I think there’s another area, which we’ll come to, but that’s a big deal for you guys, isn’t it? 

Fred Roe: 
It is. And so every facet of healthcare has regulations that they need to adhere to and they need to monitor to do that. But those are there so that you can maximise the outcome, the positive outcome to a patient. And that can be a therapy, it could be a vaccine, and making sure it’s viable because it needs to be stored under controlled conditions to make sure it’s viable, it actually works and the efficacy is there. 

If you’re talking about human tissue, what can be the matter of life and death, to make sure that that is stored in the right conditions. So the regulations that are there are there to make sure you’re maximising positive outcomes for real people, for their health and their lives. 

Nick Earle: 
For those of us who don’t work in this field, if we can just drill down on that a little bit. Let’s take something like vaccine. So vaccines, COVID vaccines are being distributed, they’re being moved, they need to be monitored. It’s tightly controlled, like you say, from a regulatory perspective. And am I right that if there’s a set of norms, I guess. Temperature range for example is one thing. 

Fred Roe: 
Yes. 

Nick Earle: 
Pressure but also temperature. And if it goes outside that temperature range for a certain period of time, what are the consequences? 

Fred Roe: 
Typically, for a vaccine, it would have to be … In long-term storage it needs to be kept very cold to make sure that it’s shelf stable essentially. But that shelf has to be very cold, in very cold conditions. Once they are approaching a time when they use it and they take it out of those cold conditions into cold, but say a typical refrigerator range, the clock starts ticking on how long that vaccine is viable. It starts to break down over time at the warmer temperatures. And so you have just a short period of time, days or weeks, before you have to use it, depending on what temperature you’re storing it at. When you take it out of that refrigerator or freezer to actually administer a vaccine, then you have an even shorter period of time. 

And so all of these things, those stages, have to be timed correctly, they have to be controlled correctly, and monitored, watched very closely. And so if, for instance, someone’s storing a medication or a vaccine, they’re aware of the temperature going out of range, they usually need to contact the manufacturer. They need to quarantine that material and make sure it’s not given to a human until the manufacturer tells them, “I need to see your data. I need to see how high the temperature went and for how long.” And the manufacturer knows that best as to whether they need to dispose of that, which is a terrible waste when you have a shortage of vaccines. 

Nick Earle: 
Exactly, yeah. I mean, that’s what I getting at. I mean, especially in the early days of COVID, there was a huge shortage. And so if you get it wrong, the vaccine manufacturer basically tells you to junk it, right? 

Fred Roe: 
That’s right. And that happened quite a bit during our latest pandemic. Exactly. And there are times, however, when if you can show them the right data, enough data and you have a resolution of that data, you can tell exactly how long it was out and by how much, the manufacturer can say, “This is still good. You can put this back with the rest of the group and you can administer it.” 

Nick Earle: 
And so it’s good for … The regulator needs it because the regulator wants the data, and the clinic, say, absolutely needs it because they have an obligation to administer it under the correct conditions. And so they have a real need for it. And I guess when you talked about human tissue, which is pretty broad, and as I understand it it’s not just literally, well, human tissue, but you also do a lot of work in the embryo field, right? 

Fred Roe: 
We do. And we do work in broad range of human tissue. We do work in blood and blood storage, organs, corneas, and also IVF. And essentially it’s our largest growing area in recent years, is in vitro fertilisation, storage and clinics of that genetic material. And that’s very, very critical. It needs to be kept very cold, very stable. But if you do, then it’s viable for indefinitely, essentially. 

Nick Earle: 
But of course, it’s one thing throwing a vaccine out, it’s another thing throwing someone’s fertilised embryos. 

Fred Roe: 
Material like that is finite. That’s right. It represents the hopes and dreams of people. And life, it is life. 

Nick Earle: 

Wow, this is a life and death use case. 

Fred Roe: 
It is. Yeah. 

Nick Earle: 
In that case. All right, so we’ve got an overview of the areas that you operate in. I know you’re certainly one of the biggest companies in this space in North America. 

And so how did people used to do this? You’ve been operating for just a few years and you’ve gone through several iterations of technology, and we’ll come back to that. But before IoT capabilities to do this, how did … People have been moving tissue, they’ve been disputing blood, IVF’s been around for a while. How did people do it before IoT? 

Fred Roe: 
Well, so depending on the space they were in, there are regulations. But most of those regulations, what they required at the time was to use methods that were within reach of the average clinic, the average hospital, the average user. And so for a very long time, what that meant was actually taking measurements by hand with a thermometer, writing those measurements down in a paper form, and perhaps only one or two measurements a day. That didn’t give you the resolution to be able to do what we’re talking about in modern time, with being able to know whether something is still going to be efficacious. 

And so whereas that’s how it was done for years, and there are still some customers that we bring on board today that are still using that method for the most part. Over time though, Nick, what happened was they started using electronics, but they would use essentially a digital thermometer that had very low resolution rate. And by that I mean, the data points were maybe only taken once an hour, maybe once every 30 minutes. And whereas that’s much better than the previous version— 

Nick Earle: 
Yeah, a lot can go wrong. 

Fred Roe: 
It can. In between those times, in between an hour, you can have a complete excursion of temperature and bring it back in, and you would not see that. You wouldn’t know that something happened. 

Nick Earle: 
That somebody left a bridge door open for 15 minutes and then closed it again. And then by the time you take the measurement, it all seems okay, but actually you’ve had a disastrous incident and- 

Fred Roe: 
That’s right. 

Nick Earle: 
Yeah, it is fascinating. And the breadth of what you do is really, really interesting. 

Let’s pivot if we can, Fred, because we want to get into the journey that you’ve been on. When you joined PharmaWatch, I think you guys, you knew what you wanted to do, you knew what the opportunity was, you knew there was huge demand, but it seems like connectivity, the highest possible connectivity, is really critical to your use case. I mean, this is one where, I mean, the closest you can get to 100% at all times and continuous. You said right at the beginning, you used the word “continuous monitoring.” And we had a few podcasts on continuous monitoring, like one we did recently with Biofourmis, which I’d encourage people to listen to in talking about continuous monitoring in healthcare being the next big thing. 

But you guys, I believe you started off with trying to solve this problem with Wi-Fi. Is that right? 

Fred Roe: 
Yeah, that’s correct. And Wi-Fi was available at the time. It was ubiquitous, and so that’s what we went with. And, Nick, it was a great product for its time. We had something on the order of 96.5% of our data points were exactly on time. With a small portion of that remaining 3.5% coming soon, right afterwards. 

But I should probably explain, Nick, that that amount of connectivity, the percent of time that you’re sending data on time, is critical. And so the remaining time between that 96.5 and 100, that represents all of the opportunity to get close to perfection. That percentage represents the entirety of the risk that’s still left there, to our users, to the patients. 

And so we were able to reach that point where we hit a plateau. And as you probably know, as probably all of the listeners know, robustness of Wi-Fi connection varies broadly where you go. 

Nick Earle: 
Yeah. I mean, it just need … Well, first of all, it wasn’t your Wi-Fi, it was the hospital or the clinic’s Wi-Fi, so you’re— 

Fred Roe: 
That’s correct. 

Nick Earle: 
So all it takes is, I mean, often it’s just human error, isn’t it? Someone unplugs the ethernet cable or- 

Fred Roe: 
With some best intentions perhaps. 

Nick Earle: 
… someone upgrades … They changed the password of the… 

Fred Roe: 
That’s right. That happens frequently. And so yeah, essentially that remaining amount of opportunity we had to reduce the risk was out of our hands and we needed to bring that into our hands. And so that’s why we started looking at other ways of connecting where we could get above that plateau. And we originally started looking at cellular IoT because we felt that put it more in our hands. 

Nick Earle: 
Yeah. So we kind of sized the objective of the IoT project, it’s to actually eat into the 3.5%. Because as we said earlier, there are loads of use cases where 96.5 would be, “Wow, that’s fantastic. Victory.” But actually, when it’s human tissue, embryos of human tissue, vaccines, 3.5% is a really, really big deal. 

So eating into it is not easy, especially in a world of fragmented cellular, different operators. We talked a lot about that in this podcast series. Everyone, they make a lot of claims, but the fact is that achieving near as damn it 100% percent is a very difficult thing and it’s also very dependent on the capabilities of the device. Let’s go to the next stage of your story. So phase one, Wi-Fi, it got to 96.5%. Which is good, better than paper. 

Fred Roe: 
Yes, by far. 

Nick Earle: 
For sure. 

Fred Roe: 
Because you also have transcription errors. People who just don’t know how to do it. 

Nick Earle: 
Yeah. People write their own stuff down, they … Yeah, human beings make mistakes. Right. So then you went for your first attempt at a cellular solution, and what happened there? 

Fred Roe: 
Well, it was better. We saw about a 30% reduction in that 3.5%. That brought us down about 30%. 

Nick Earle: 
Over a percent. Yeah, just over a 1% reduction. Yeah. 

Fred Roe: 
Yeah, and so it was great, but we didn’t feel it lived up to the promise that it could. And I’ll tell you, so when we did that, we chose pretty carefully what we went after. And that was a single cellular band that was known to better penetrate buildings. And that’s one of the issues that you have when you’re installing in a pharmacy that’s in the basement of a hospital, and so that was very important to us. 

So we were able to reduce about that much, but it didn’t live up to the promise, we knew that we could do better. But because of that single band, it may penetrate better, but it’s not on every tower across the country or the world. 

Nick Earle: 
And that’s a good point. And we do have a lot of technical listeners. A lot of people in the industry listen to this podcast I found out. When I go to shows they are like, “Oh, you’re the guy who does that podcast.” 

But yeah, I mean, you have these things where something’s technically possible, but then you say, “Well, yeah, but is it ubiquitously available everywhere? Is every tower enabled with that?” Well, no, not quite. I mean, my favourite one at the moment is Narrowband IoT, which everybody wants to talk about and it sounds great. But then you say, is there such a thing as global Narrowband IoT? Well, no. 

Fred Roe: 
You’re correct. 

Nick Earle: 
So you got about just over a percent, I mean, if my math is right. 

Fred Roe: 
Yeah. That’s right. That’s right. 

Nick Earle: 
You’ve got to 96.5 to- 

Fred Roe: 
About 97.5. 

Nick Earle: 
97.5, 97.8. But still, I mean, the difference between 100% and 98.5% in business impact terms is a lot more than 1.5%. 

Fred Roe: 
That’s right. 

Nick Earle: 
I mean, it’s not a 1.5% problem, it’s a big problem. And so of course, that’s where our journey kicked in. And so now obviously you are one of our customers, but maybe you can share in your own words what’s happened since you started working with ourselves and what’s the, if you can share, what progress have you made on eating into that number? 

Fred Roe: 
Yeah. Yeah, I can. I’ll tell you, working with you has been very good, and we can talk more about this after. But essentially we knew that, as innovators and moving forward, we were aiming high. We also innovate very quickly and the results matter. 

And so we were very careful in choosing our next partner, which is Eseye. And we felt that it was the right thing to go with, for many reasons. But what I can tell you is, that solution we chose with you is a multi-carrier, multi-band solution, and it essentially has many options. If that Narrowband isn’t the one that works for you because of what’s available, it finds what is available. And so far, and we’re working with you together every day, we’re making even greater improvements. That we have taken what was left, that 0.25%, and reduced it to less than one eighth of what it was. We’ve gained another seven eighths of what was left. And so we’re in the 99.6% range right now. It’s as good or better than what we expected and what we were shooting for, and it’s getting better every day. 

Nick Earle: 
That’s very cool. And as you say, it’s getting better. It’s creeping up towards that holy grail. 

Fred Roe: 
It is. It is. 

Nick Earle: 
The holy grail of the number, which is great. And for mission-critical use cases you’ve got to get as close as possible. And it’s not easy, it’s a variety of things. It’s a lot to do with the being completely agnostic from an operator point of view. It’s a lot to do with being able to do problem resolution without having to raise tickets on the operator. So to be able to do it quickly without having to wait for somebody else to get involved. And in particular, which is where I’d like to go now, it is everything to do with the device. It is everything to do with the device and the device’s capabilities, which we always talk about in each of these podcasts. 

And in your case, Fred, and your company, you’ve got a very interesting story on the device. Because you just used a phrase there, which is, if Narrowband isn’t available, the device finds something else. And it’s interesting the way you phrase that, “the device,” because the device finds, because in the IoT industry that’s not actually how it works. What actually happens is the platform, the cloud platform, finds something else and then there’s a decision made. It could be a human being actually, a switch, or there’s a push, OTA. 

But one of the reasons I wanted you on our podcast series is this is the first case study of SMARTconnect. And as listeners, regular listeners will know, SMARTconnect is really important initiative for us. It’s essentially moving the device intelligence, the switching intelligence if you like, the logic, from the cloud into the device. And we think that’s the next big thing. We think the device has to choose the connectivity. And therefore, if you are a customer, a company like you, you’ve got different devices that have different rules for what to happen, got different use cases by different device types. And so if you can actually get the rules engine to be device resident, then actually you can then start to really customise and optimise and personalise the user experience. 

So to make it real, you’ve got the AnyNet+ SIM and you’ve got SMARTconnect, one of the very first adopters of it, but there was an incident in Canada, which I’d love you to tell the story if you don’t mind, because it really brings it to life of what happened. 

Fred Roe: 
Yes. Yeah, and so essentially what you were saying is, to us, is this. If that decision that you were talking about has to be made by a platform or made elsewhere, it needs to be communicated to the device. And if you’ve lost connectivity, it can’t receive those instructions. That’s why they need that logic and that needs to reside on the device. 

And so in Canada, it was our first large installation in Canada, and it was a set of IVF clinics there. We were actually waiting for our work with you and all of our testing to be borne out before we provided that solution to them because we wanted them to have the very best solution that they could do this. And it was very shortly after our installation that we had what is broadly known now as the Rogers outage in Canada. 

And so there was an outage. It was around 19-hours long, countrywide. And I guess the best part of this, right from the beginning, the simplest part of it rather, is that because we have a choice, even though we are talking about the same facility, different rooms of the same facility, many of the devices connected better to something other than Rogers. And so many of them simply weren’t infected to begin with. For those who were, we had many of them reconnect within 30 minutes. The vast majority of them reconnected because of what you’re talking about. The logic, the decision-making was resonant on the device. And so it made that reconnect, knowing that it had lost its connection, made the connection to another carrier. 

And so it’s something we simply couldn’t do before. With our previous version, if we lost that connection- 

Nick Earle: 
There’s nothing you can- 

Fred Roe: 
… there’s nothing we can do. That is very similar to the situation we were with Wi-Fi. Although we had more robust connection across the installed base, we still were at the mercy of someone else and something else as to whether or not when we could reconnect. 

Nick Earle: 
And just to give a little more context for that, if people are listening to this and are intrigued. Of course what happened, of course the Rogers network went out, it was one of the biggest outages anywhere worldwide, 19 hours. And in fact, it was ATMs were lost, emergency services were lost, I mean- 

Fred Roe: 
Right, right. 

Nick Earle: 
This was mother of all outages. But typically what happens with devices, the devices, in this case, they thought they were connected because they had five bars on a cell phone. And that doesn’t mean that the data path is available, it means that it’s connected to the tower and you kind of assume, well, the tower is connected to the network. And so the devices would keep on, no matter what they were, including cell phones, they keep on trying to connect to the network. They’re trying to connect, they’re trying to connect, and they don’t know any better. Just saying, “Well, it’s not available.” 

And it’s kind of like when you land in a plane in a strange city, like if I go to the US and I land in a … I look around and I’m jealous, everyone’s already on their phone and I have to wait. But my phone has to register on the network, it has to find the data path. Even though I’ve got five bars on my phone, I can’t download my email, whatever. So if the device can’t get a data path, it can’t be communicated with to be told to switch- 

Fred Roe: 
That’s right. 

Nick Earle: 
… because being outside of your control. 

Fred Roe: 
That’s right. 

Nick Earle: 
Whereas in the case of SMARTconnect, you set a rule which says, try the data path three times, this number of minutes apart. And if it doesn’t, then on your own violation, switch to something else because the IMSIs are preloaded in the device, so you basically are setting your own rules. And that’s actually what happened. 

And it’s a nice case study. I mean, it’s not a nice case study because nobody wants a 19-hour outage. But actually, if you need to prove an idea and you prove the value of a new technology, then to actually have a terrible situation like that is battle-proven. And I guess from your point of view, your client who you mentioned, a series of IVF clinics, that really raises your profile with them because you were able to say, “Well, look, we recovered. We kept you in business.” 

Fred Roe: 
Right, right. And so that period of time that we were talking about, getting close to 100% connection, an uptime with your connection, as I’d mentioned, that is essentially risk. It doesn’t mean anything necessarily went wrong, but you don’t know. You’re essentially blind to it until you get that data. And so our devices were, although they collect a month of data and they can backfill that data once it makes a connection, they need to know now if everything is okay. If they’re going to maximise their outcomes and protect their patients, they need to know right now. 

And so that’s what it represented. It represented, again, minimising that amount of time, the amount of time that they were unaware. 19 hours, that’s a long workday for someone. They’re generally not working a 19-hour day. And so much of that time they were actually at home, but they could still see remotely that everything was okay. 

Nick Earle: 
Yeah. And we should say 19 hours is really unusual. I mean, this was a very famous, outage. 

Fred Roe: 
It is. 

Nick Earle: 
But hey, even if it was 90 minutes, given what you said earlier in the podcast, if you want to take data every five or 10 minutes, which I think you- 

Fred Roe: 
We do every five minutes, yes. 

Nick Earle: 
Every five, right. So you take every five, that’s your value prop. Well, if the network’s down for 30 minutes, you’re only getting a sixth of the data. And as you said, a lot can go wrong in 30 minutes. 

Yeah, that’s one of the reasons why I wanted to chat to you because our belief is that, although clearly the MVNO model has obstructed the switch into the cloud and made it agnostic across the cellular operators, actually the ultimate destination of the switching logic is the device. And we’ll talk about this in a future podcast, not just cellular switches, because you can say, if the Wi-Fi is available and it’s good quality, then use it. Or if not, if something else is available, if Bluetooth is available, then use it. Or if not, if cellular is available, then use it, but only use it if the signal strength is this, the latency is this, and the data path is open. 

So by getting granular, you actually have much more granular network switching rules because you’re using software to configure the connectivity. Because the device itself, the modem, does not have that level of intelligence and that capability. So it’s almost like a configurable connectivity app for a device management. 

There’s so much here we can talk about. I actually want to, if we can, pivot as we get towards the end of the podcast, but into another subject, and it comes back to something you said right at the very beginning. It’s to do with the regulator and that word “continuous.” I’ve been thinking about that word “continuous” since you said it. I was referring to some of the … We’ve done multiple podcasts with healthcare companies, companies in the healthcare field, and it’s clear that every single one of them has said the word “continuous.” 

And the idea, actually, funny enough, I was explaining it to somebody today before the podcast, saying, “Well, the problem with healthcare, one of the problems with healthcare in general globally, is that it is the exact opposite of continuous.” I mean, you catch something, let’s just say in general a disease, you catch something. Eventually, you feel sick. Eventually, then a few days later you get round to making a doctor’s appointment. 

A few days later, I don’t know what it’s like over there, but in the UK it might be five days before you can get in to see the doctor. The doctor’s a GP, general practitioner. The doctor then refers you to a specialist, then you have to start again. You have to apply to see a specialist. You have to get to see the specialist. The specialist then says, “Oh, you need some tests.” By the time they actually get to it’s the opposite of continuous. 

And so the ability for the technology to continuously take measurements and then the ability to go to proactive intervention, and ultimately preemptive intervention, is obviously the holy grail. 

Fred Roe: 
Yes. 

Nick Earle: 
And it’s not just a desired outcome. There’s a lot of people saying that the regulators, and be it the drug companies that want this, or be it entities like the FDA or around the world the equivalent, they’re actually really very, very interested in continuous. And so although every five minutes is best in class, it could be in two, three years time they want every minute. 

Fred Roe: 
Right. 

Nick Earle: 
Who knows, they may want … Contracts may stipulate the ability to provide continuous monitoring. So that’s probably in your mind … because there’s one parameter is 98.52, 99 point whatever, very close to 100. But the other axis is the frequency of taking it. And I think it’s something which you are very conscious about as well, is … 

Fred Roe: 
We are, yeah. And so we send data every five minutes. That allowed us the right kind of resolution to see all of the trends that might affect us. Also, some of the equipment that we hook up to, essentially its response time at times can be limited to about a five-minute window. So in many cases, although we could take data more often, there was nothing to be seen in many of those cases, other than that. 

Nick Earle: 
Yes, yeah. 

Fred Roe: 
However, internally here, we’re always innovating. One of the things that we’ve looked at, we’re working on, is that ability to actually send data every five minutes, unless the sensor onboard recognises that you’ve had an excursion between those five minutes. In which case it would reach out and send that data immediately and the alert immediately. 

Nick Earle: 
Right, right. So event-driven data transmission within the five-minute window, which absolutely gets you closer to continuous, which really is the holy grail because it is extremely hard to do. But by having event triggers, normally detection behaviour, AI/ML type things, if this happens and it meets these criteria, don’t do anything. But if it doesn’t meet these criteria and it’s within these ranges, then transmit. 

And so the bar is always being raised on you guys, isn’t it? It’s much more complicated than just connectivity. It’s now sensor event types of data within certain parameters triggered the transmission of data. 

Fred Roe: 
Yeah, exactly. And so the client need and the patient need drives the innovation. And then that availability and the innovation there then drives the regulations. Because, as I mentioned before, even if there is something that’s now available that is, but not broadly available, the regulations aren’t going to force it until it’s broadly available. But you have to innovate it first and get it out there and prove it. 

And so that’s where we’re at. We’re at that cutting edge. We’re riding on the crest of that wave, and we are seeing that regulations are changing over time based on what we and other companies are making capable and being available to be in the hands of everyone. 

Nick Earle: 
And I think it further reinforces the need for the device, because the device expertise and the device resident logic, because that data is collected at the device from sensors. As you said, not all the sensors are transmitting the data all the time, but increasingly there will be more sensors transmitting more data. And so you have to be able to collect the data, analyse the data, and have a framework to interpret the data at the edge. 

Fred Roe: 
Yes. That’s right. That’s right. 

Nick Earle: 
Not at the centre. This problem can only be solved at the edge. 

Fred Roe: 
That’s right. 

Nick Earle: 
Not by backhauling it to the centre because you might transmit immediately. 

Fred Roe: 
So we’ve been known for years and years as having just the most advanced capabilities on our client portal. But you’re right, that’s where the real innovation is happening. And what you can do at the portal, it depends so much on what happens at the edge and what you can do at the edge. And that immediate action has to happen at the edge. It can’t be driven by the portal, it can’t be driven by the cloud software. It has to be right there on the edge. And they have to work in tandem, obviously. But yeah, you’re right. That’s where all the biggest gains are to be made, it’s out there in the environment, at the edge. 

Nick Earle: 
Okay. Well, this is a story that’s going to run and run and applicable to so many industries, but particularly healthcare. 

I want to finish, if I can, Fred, by asking you to give advice to our listeners. We get a lot of feedback. And one of the things people say is, “Could you ask your guest what advice they would give to people who are embarking upon projects or are going to start again a failed project,” which is the most common environment actually. But what advice would you give about partnership and what partnership means and lessons that you’ve learned in this process? 

Fred Roe: 
Yeah, so it’s critical. You can’t do everything yourself. That’s an almost non-existent business model. You have to have the right partners who are the experts in their area. And so to me, it has to do with understanding your clients and understanding their needs and therefore our needs. We don’t want to make jelly beans, we want to make the latest capabilities available to our clients. And so we’re constantly innovating, and we’re innovating for clients whose business life and death. And so sense of urgency and the fast pace of innovation, taking the client very seriously, making their needs and their urgency your own. I guess what I’m saying is, choose partners that match your own values and your own sense of urgency, your style. 

And that’s why we found Eseye was actually an excellent partner right from the beginning. In discussing with you, you were extremely transparent with us. You provided amazing references of other real world customers that have been working with you for a while, and we could discuss essentially anything with them. And we did. But what we found through that was that you very closely match those characteristics we saw in ourselves that are critical to our success. 

Nick Earle: 
Okay. Well, couldn’t have put it better myself, and it has a lot more credibility coming from you than coming from me. Thank you for saying that. 

Fred. Thank you so much. I’m sure the listeners found it really interesting. And something tells me that, depending on how long we do IoT Leaders podcasts for, there is a lot of demands, maybe we’re going to be doing it for a long time, I suspect that you’re a potential candidate for a second episode, if only because- 

Fred Roe: 
Great. 

Nick Earle: 
… things are developing so much in the healthcare field in general, that might well be we come back at some point and say, “Well, we thought that was cutting edge now look what capabilities we have now, and look at what the regulators are saying now and look at how the market is changing,” et cetera, et cetera. 

But in the meantime, we’ll have to draw a line under it. Thank you so much for your time today and explaining it so well and so enthusiastically. I’m sure people really enjoyed listening to it. 

Fred Roe: 
Oh, thank you so much, Nick. It has really been a pleasure. I would love to talk with you again, and there’s no doubt we will have things to talk about because we are developing together. 

Nick Earle: 
Okay. Well, don’t tell your competition too much right now. We’ll come back in the future. 

Fred Roe: 
Okay. All right. 

Nick Earle: 
All right. That was absolutely great. So you’ve been listening to IoT Leaders podcast with me, your host, Nick Earle. Thanks again for listening, and keep tuned in because there’s more in the hopper that we’re going to be recording and releasing because there’s so much going on in IoT and there’s so many exciting stories about innovation and business use cases out there. 

But in the meantime, Fred, thanks again. Thanks for being a guest on IoT Leaders. We’ll talk soon. Thank you very much. 

Fred Roe: 
Thank you. Take care. 

Nick Earle: 
Take care. 

Outro:
Thanks for tuning in to IoT Leaders, a podcast brought to you by Eseye. Our team delivers innovative global IoT cellular connectivity solutions that just work, helping our customers deploy differentiated experiences and disrupt their markets. Learn more at eseye.com.

You’ve been listening to IoT Leaders, featuring digitization leadership on the front lines of IoT. Our vision for this podcast is to be your guide to IoT and digital disruption, helping you to plot the right route to success. We hope today’s lessons, stories, strategies, and insights have changed your vision of IoT. Let us know how we’re doing by subscribing, rating, reviewing, and recommending us. Thanks for listening. Until next time.

Resources

Case Studies

AmericanPharma Technologies

Learn more

Podcasts

Reinventing Healthcare with IoT, AI and ML

Learn more

Videos

How AnyNet SMARTconnect™ can save you time and money

Learn more

Solution Papers

AnyNet SMARTconnect™

Learn more