Everyware produces smart sensors to better track and monitor the critical assets that make up our physical world. One use of their monitoring solution is to track the storage of temperature-sensitive items, like blood and medical supplies. With constant, 24x7 temperature recordings, hospitals and their staff are able to more accurately and safely perform blood transfusions and administer vaccines.

Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine, highly sensitive to temperature, catalyzed an added complexity to the mix. Standard medicines are held at 2-8°C. COVID-19 vaccines, to date, have required a much lower temperature, hovering around -70°C. To better monitor the storage of the COVID-19 vaccine, the United Kingdom’s National Health Service, NHS, partnered with Everyware.

Exploring DLT

With multiple interested parties participating in the cold storage supply chain, Everyware wanted to explore the use of distributed ledger technology to store the temperature recordings. A centralized database can be tampered with, enabling individuals to remove or manipulate potentially life-saving information.

To securely and reliably manage their IoT data Everyware looked to Hedera. As the only public ledger able to use the hashgraph consensus algorithm, Hedera provides an efficient, high-throughput, low-latency solution for achieving a log of immutable data. This made Hedera a suitable and cost-effective match for Everyware’s high-write workload, as you find in the Internet of Things use cases.

“For managing highly critical information, like the COVID-19 vaccine’s temperature, Hedera Hashgraph provides us immutable trust at the speed required for our IoT devices.”

Tom Screen, Co-founder at Everyware

Hedera Consensus Service

To implement this, Everyware leverages the Hedera Consensus Service to log device temperature event data to the decentralized Hedera network. Distributed consensus is achieved by the Hedera network nodes, acting as an unbiased neutral party to order and timestamp the sensor data. This cryptographically secure and tamper-proof process allows for relevant, authorized parties to have a greater degree of trust and the ability to confidently respond to any temperature changes.

Everyware currently achieves this by having all device data sent to its ingestion server. This application encrypts the data and sends it as an HCS message to a Hedera topic. To have a higher degree of granularity, and increase the integrity of the information further, Everyware anticipates giving each device its own set of keys to better ensure where the data is derived from.

Like many, Everyware is fixated on vaccine distribution at the moment, but Hedera Consensus Service provides their tech stack with a flexible tool. In time, Everyware and HCS will monitor a broader set of industry assets.