Devising an Internet of Things-Based Healthcare Medical Container for the Transportation of Organs and Healthcare Products Using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles †

Abstract

Every second counts when a patient who requires an organ transplant is finally matched with a donor. The organ’s post-transplant performance declines with the increasing time between the organ’s removal and transplantation into the recipient. Organs must be transported from point A to B as quickly and safely as possible to improve the chances of success. In addition to delivering medical goods or vaccines to hard-to-reach places, drones can help us to save lives across the world, but there, are some issues to address, one of which is maintaining container temperature and humidity and monitoring it. Further, drones carrying medical containers flying at different altitudes causes temperature changes, which may affect the organs. To tackle such difficulties, in this work a smart container embedded with a Peltier module (thermoelectric cooler) and a temperature sensor has been developed to maintain the temperature thereby providing safety for healthcare products or organs. Further, the relay module is utilized to control the Peltier module and ESP8266 WIFI Microcontroller (MCU) which also enables the user to send live data to the cloud and also allows the user to monitor and control the temperature remotely. The Blynk Internet of Things (IoT) platform is used to monitor the temperature. Results show that the proposed system is highly efficient at monitoring and controlling temperature changes accurately according to user-defined values. For demonstration purposes, the temperature of the container is maintained at 12 degrees Celsius and the performance of the system is presented. The medical cargo drone carrying healthcare products is tested in real time and at different altitude levels to examine the performance of the developed system.