Alarm concept for monitoring rooms and living objects under laboratory conditions.
The Leibniz Institute for Environmental Medicine Research (IUF) in Düsseldorf worked with Heuser Software AG to develop a new, innovative alarm concept for monitoring rooms and living objects under laboratory conditions.
As one of the leading institutes in Germany for the molecular prevention of environmentally induced health disorders, the IUF needed the ability to monitor its premises according to various criteria during renovation work and to digitally inform specific contact persons in the event of an alarm situation. In addition, the technical equipment used in the laboratories and the living objects in them must be protected from power failures.
In order to meet these requirements, Heuser Software AG not only developed the alarm concept, but also the necessary software for use based on commercially available hardware components from different manufacturers.
The heart of the solution is a network of microcomputers, the Raspberry Pis Versions 2 and 3, which are equipped with a UPS compatible with the devices (Pi-USV/S.USV) and placed in alarm-sensitive rooms. As soon as individual rooms are affected by power outages or when voltage spikes are registered, the individual systems report corresponding events back to dynamically declared master systems in the network. Depending on the severity of the incident, the corresponding alarms are sent via GSM sticks via SMS to scientists on duty, who can then initiate specific emergency measures.
In addition, for the purpose of the well-being of the living objects, multi-sensor stations are implemented in a parallel Zigbee network from Libelium. These periodically send air quality and certain environmental values, such as temperature, humidity, etc. If threshold value violations occur, concrete alarms are also reported to the master systems, which forward them to contact persons if necessary.
The software implemented by Heuser Software AG to operate the sensors is essentially based on a specially developed OSGi framework, which is operated in the context of a Java embedded environment on the aforementioned microcomputers. The detection and sending of alarms is implemented with a separately developed OSGi-based Zigbee/JMS bundle, while the control of the Raspberry Pi USVs and their event evaluation was done via native programming.
All systems are designed to be fully redundant and mirror the resulting data with each other. Using the REST-based web frontend developed specifically for the IUF, scientists can immediately display the current status of ongoing measurements and environmental values or evaluate them historically over any date period.
For security reasons, the network is operated in an encapsulated manner and operates completely independently of the environment.
The successful commissioning of the solution outlined above was not only developed for the necessary alarm signaling, but also serves as a preference object for a fully-fledged and yet cost-saving option for signaling alarms in an energy-efficient, low-administration, quick and reliable manner.
We are pleased to have gained the IUF as a new customer.