MachineSense LLC Carries out Fire-fighting Pilots in Indian Hospitals
Hospitals in India are extremely vulnerable to power quality issues because of four important factors. Historically, in most hospitals, the non-linear load was absent.
Baltimore, US-based MachineSense, LLC on Friday announced the successful completion of five pilot projects in India involving the use of sensor-based advanced IoT technology to monitor power quality and help prevent medical equipment breakdown including fires in hospitals.
Hospitals in India are extremely vulnerable to power quality issues because of four important factors. Historically, in most hospitals, the non-linear load was absent. As MRI becomes an integral part of the diagnosis, more battery-driven equipment, invertors, LEDs, UPS have been introduced. Thus, power quality in hospitals has steadily degraded
In many hospitals, the wiring is timeworn and the same line provides power to MRI and other linear loads. Harmonics from MRI machines often impact the other equipment in the same line.
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MachineSense is at the forefront of developing IoT technology for public safety and has pioneered a system that will allow managers of public facilities like hospitals, who often lack highly skilled electrical engineers, to have real-time insights into the status and health of their powerlines.
To solve the complex power quality problems, one needs data from current-voltage imbalance, harmonics and earthing. These parameters constantly differ from day to night and weekday to weekend. MachineSense has designed its power expert system to automate the whole process of power quality engineering - from data collection to analyzing and designing solutions in edge and public cloud. This has enabled the power engineers to understand and solve the issues seamlessly.
Sudip Majumder, COO of L&T NXT, which is the scale-up partner for MachineSense IIoT solution observed that most of the hospitals in India are ill-informed about the poor power quality they are forced to work in. There is danger of the hospital catching fire from current power imbalance as most do not have appropriate circuit breakers.
An ongoing pilot project is at the Institute of Neurosciences, Kolkata (I-NK) – one of the leading hospitals in eastern India for the treatment of neurological disorders, where MachineSense is running its diagnosis system for the last couple of months. “Such a robust system will protect the MRI from abrupt downtime and the hospital from accidental fire hazards,” said I-NK Electrical Engineering Chief Mr. Subir Mustafi. MachineSense runs pilot projects in hospital power quality in Florida and Kolkata. The largest issue in both countries stems from Uninterruptable Power Supply (UPS) to MRI machines. UPS may be saving MRI but they throw out a lot of bad harmonics that kill other machines in the adjacent lines.
Rajiv Sivaraman, head of partner solutions of Mindsphere by Siemens, said that systems and efforts need to be applied to improve the power quality of the hospitals and especially the power being fed to MRI. They are glad that Mindsphere Gold partner MachineSense now has a solution for protecting the MRI Machines.
One of the biggest advantages is the economical solution model that MachineSense offers. Biplab Pal, CTO of MachineSense, said that given the solution is always statistical and can be complex for power quality engineers, a low-cost solution model is highly desirable.