MEDICAL GAS SYSTEMS
Autonomous running may soon be a reality
At a meeting last September at Chesham-based medical gas system specialist, SHJ, key personnel explained to HEJ editor, Jonathan Baillie, how the company is increasingly harnessing AI, IOT, and edge computing to enhance its systems to run and fault-find almost autonomously, feeding back fault data instantly should plant begin running sub-optimally, and taking remedial action to restore full performance, often without the need for human intervention. Such is the power of such technologies, that SHJ believes healthcare estates teams may soon be able to leave their medical gas systems to ‘run themselves’. At a second meeting this February, the SHJ team reported on recent developments, and highlighted the features they believe make the company’s installation, servicing, maintenance, and technical back-up stand out.
At an interesting previous meeting last autumn, I met SHJ’s managing director, Stafford Scopes, who explained (HEJ – November 2019) how in 1967, his father, Ronald, established the business to provide a more responsive installation service to UK hospitals than was available at the time after a sizeable backlog of such work had built up. The Chesham firm, which has its own assembly facility close to its head office, has considerably developed in the intervening five decades, and, in the past 5-10 years particularly, has harnessed technology including Artificial Intelligence, Internet-of-Things, and edge computing, to give its systems an ‘edge’. Central to one of SHJ’s major selling points – the ability to ‘see’ how customers’ medical gas systems are performing and pre-empt any ‘problems’ – is the SHJ Customer Portal, an easy-to use ‘front- end’, via which the company and its engineers, and increasingly also customers, can access data on the operation, servicing, and maintenance of
medical gas systems at single or multiple hospital sites. The portal has recently been enhanced and ‘relaunched’, with a new name, K’nect. The data that the portal holds – in secure, encrypted form – is ‘transmitted’ direct to it either from one of SHJ’s sophisticated ‘intelligent’ plant control/plant monitoring systems, or by an SHJ engineer out on site equipped with a PDA.
SHJ’s Empower ‘intelligent’ plant control system (shown is the latest version) provides real-time diagnostics, alerts and fault detection.
Even more ‘intelligent’ plant control and data analysis Many customers are still using SHJ’s earlier Evolution plant monitoring/alarm system and Empower ‘intelligent’ plant control system on their medical gas plant, but in the past 3-4 years, the company has put substantial work into developing their more ‘powerful’ successors – the Enforce ‘intelligent’ plant control system, and the complementary Emanate Artificial Intelligence-driven data management and analysis software. The development of both new systems has
Screenshots from the Empower intelligent plant controller showing key operating data for a number of compressors. April 2020 Health Estate Journal 19
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