MassHighTech November 24, 2003

 

Ware-Withal: Ember, Sensitech have fish shipping down cold
By Elizabeth Dinan

The words “fish and chips” take on new meaning once you hear what Beverly’s Sensitech and Boston’s Ember are up to.

Marrying Sensitech’s temperature and humidity tracking with Ember’s radio frequency identification (RFID) chips, the conjoined technology makes fish hauling a whole lot smarter. Moving fish and other perishables in the back of trucks has historically been a dicey proposition, but factor in RFID and wrap a reporting system around it and you’ve got what the companies are calling an “automated cold chain.”

The offspring technology of the Sensitech-Ember union is already being piloted through 1.5 million monitors, put to work over the past year for tracking conditions during delivery of delicate cargo including salmon, meat, grapes, vaccines and ice cream. The pilot products are all branded with recognizable names but remain confidential, says Sensitech CEO Eric Schultz, because people tend to associate monitoring with a problem rather than with quality assurance.

Schultz says a commercial product should be on the market by the end of next year and if that means fewer spoiled vaccines and bad clams, there’s cause for celebration.

It works like this: the RFID/temperature and humidity tracking hardware is installed in the back of delivery trucks, where it monitors conditions throughout the road trip. Other data can be collected through custom add-ons to the monitors, including incidents of shock, which are important in the transport of electronics and ethylene levels, vital factors during the transport of produce.

As an outfitted delivery truck backs up to a loading dock to dispense say, buckets of raw clams, a reader collects the transit condition data. A diary of the truck’s temperature and humidity during the entire trip is automatically downloaded onto the receiving company’s system. Monitors can also report events during the trip such as how many times truck doors were opened and closed in live time, in addition to a live look at the temperature and humidity during delivery.

Using the information, Schultz says, a company looking to take delivery of clams or other product can make a decision about refusing delivery, negotiating a discount, or working with the delivery company to make changes.

“You know right away if shelf life has been compromised,” says Ember vice president Adrian Tuck.

“And there’s minimum human intervention,” Schultz adds.

Beyond the immediate delivery decisions, users can look at their data collectively, such as a delivery outfit’s performance over 1,000 trips for a big picture, and to make long-term decisions. Tuck says the new tracking and reporting system can also watch for theft and he hopes to get it into the homeland security market as a way to know if containers have been tampered with when they arrive at Point B after being inspected at Point A.

Ember has been making RFID chips since the company was founded in 2001 by expatriates from MIT’s Media Lab. The company also makes self-organizing mesh networks and low-power radio chips, turning RFID into network systems with live tracking and reporting.

Schultz founded Sensitech in 1990 with temperature and humidity monitoring products to protect freshness and brand for food and pharmaceutical companies. An early tenant at Beverly’s Cummings Center, his company employs 180 and he’s banking on the Ember partnership to grow even further.

The combined technologies promise the means for analysis about route design, database management, theft control, quality management and equipment evaluation. But best of all, it just might reduce the chances that you’ll ever eat a bad clam.