Pervasive Computing Technologies to Monitor Vaccine Cold Chains in Developing Countries

We have deployed a mobile phone-based temperature monitoring system in the national vaccine cold chain in Albania. This deployment was done in collaboration with the Albanian Ministry of Health, the World Health Organization, and PATH, our Seattle-based partner in this project. Our system covers the national vaccine storage facility, one district-level storage facility, and several local health centers. The monitoring devices are based on FoneAstra, a low-cost sensing system we developed for a range of applications. FoneAstra uses the cellular network to send summarized sensor data via SMS messages, a medium that is familiar and available in many developing nations. When the data arrives at a central server it is stored in a database and accessible to supervisors through a dashboard viewable with a web browser. We describe how our system has helped diagnose problems in the vaccine cold chain (in one case, within several hours of first being deployed). Practicality and scalability are points of our system and we discuss these in comparison to the current state of the art in cold chain monitoring.