Asset tracker combines cellular IoT and Bluetooth with five-year battery life

Nordic Semiconductor has announced that Meshtech is using both a Nordic multi-mode LTE-M/NB-IoT nRF9160 SiP and Nordic nRF52811 Bluetooth SoC in what is claimed to be the world's first environmental asset tracker to consolidate cellular IoT and Bluetooth wireless technologies with five-year battery life (road mapped to ten on the same tracker hardware).

The Meshtech Cloud Tracker is intended to stop the huge on-going compensation cost that is often incurred in the supply of perishable goods that are at peril of spoiling and being transported to wrong customer locations or in the wrong quantities.

"Our Cloud Tracker is designed to detect delivery or storage issues quickly enough that they can be corrected without jeopardizing an entire consignment," comments Meshtech Interim CEO, Preben Skretteberg. "This means perishable goods suppliers now have a viable way to prevent unnecessary compensation costs, while also being able to exceed both current and [increasingly strict] future regulations that may apply to the shipment and storage of perishable goods. The next step is to take the Cloud Tracker beyond perishable goods, and we are already in discussions with multiple large enterprises in other market segments and industries regarding this."

"This really is a game-changer for perishable goods manufacturers," continues Skretteberg. "It just gives them environmental data-driven insights into how their goods are loaded, stored, and shipped that could eliminate the majority of their compensation cost losses which then become an unnecessary overhead. None of this was commercially viable before the advent of cellular IoT which has made environmental asset tracking both technologically feasible and scalable in a way that wasn't possible before now."

The tracker is created for commercial and industrial perishable goods applications and is supplied in a ruggedised 113mm x 110mm x 19mm package that weighs 194g, and highlights an in-built Hall Effect magnetic sensor, temperature sensor, and three-axis accelerometer. The device is powered by six internal 3.6V AA batteries and incorporates all necessary antennas and a pre-installed embedded SIM card tha(eSIM) t can function globally.