Event Processing blog

Real-Time Temperature Monitoring

In an interesting demonstration of real-time monitoring, Apama participated in a recent study that was conducted by Radboud University as part of the Dutch "Four Days March".  The march is an annual event in which tens of thousands of participants walk daily distances of 30-50 KMs for four days in succession.  Unfortunately, past marches have had some unfortunate instances where participants have been overcome by heat - including a couple of deaths.

In a pilot study this year, volunteers took a pill embedded with an RFID chip and thermometer, which sent signals every 10 seconds to a Bluetooth-enabled GPS phone.  The phone in turn sent the information to an implementation of Apama, which correlated the information about the volunteer, their temperature and their location, all plotted on an implementation of Google Maps. Leveraging the capabilities of Apama, monitors could track the progress of volunteers and identify those volunteers whose temperatures exceeded certain thresholds.  And with the ability to correlate that information with the GPS data, they could tell where those volunteers were on the route, thus delivering a CEP-driven infrastructure for real-time monitoring and, if needed, a pre-emptive reaction to help somebody who might shortly be in distress.

In the image below, one can see the purple "pins", illustrating where on the route the volunteers are.

Another CEP Use Case - Good for Coral8!

Coral8 has published information about an RFID use case in the healthcare industry in their article in RFID Journal about Patient Care Technology Systems and their use of Coral8.   Here's an excerpt about the system and the value complex event processing (CEP) plays in it:

Patient Care Technology Systems (PCTS) provide optimization solutions for improving the operating performance and quality of health-care organizations. The PCTS Amelior solution uses RFID and sensor networks to identify, track and correlate the movement of patients and assets, isolating any processing and utilization problems (see Harmon Hospital Implements RFID to Track Assets).

Originally, the Amelior system was built with a custom-coded event-correlation engine. As customer environments became more sophisticated, PCTS chose to replace the custom-coded infrastructure with off-the-shelf CEP software—specifically, the Coral8 Engine.

Congratulations to the Coral8 folks - John Morrell, the author of this article, and Mark Tsimelzon, the CTO of Coral8.  It's good news to see adoption in the RFID space, and even better to see that they have convinced their customer to be public about their use to help describe the value of CEP technology.