It’s a safe bet that most biological manufacturing sites, clinical test labs, and biomedical research centers have CO2 incubators onsite. Your facility many have dozens of them onsite, as scientists often use them to grow high value, specialized cells of interest. The growth cycles usually take 24-48 hours, which means that scientists/engineers will not always be on site when incubators are in use. This kinda leaves incubations vulnerable as no one may be onsite in case there’s a problem with the equipment. Cells are finicky and require specific conditions to grow. If there’s a problem during the incubation cycles, there’s more at stake than just repeating the incubation process. It could require repeating days or weeks of prep work or even procuring the cells from the vendor. That equates to lost time and money!
The good news is that incubators have some built-in functions in place to alarm scientists/engineers when environmental conditions inside the incubator cross threshold conditions. Most incubators can measure and report out common environmental parameters of interest:
So to summarize, the benefits of IoT incubator monitoring are many: cutting costs related to materials and labor, happier staff by reducing unpleasant surprises, and 21 CFR Part 11 compliant reporting. To learn more about IoT-based incubator monitoring can improve operational efficiencies at your sites, download our white paper.