One of the things I really enjoy doing but don’t do nearly enough is cycling. While I was in college I participated in a bike trip down the coast of California one January. The organization that handled all of the logistics of our trip, Wandering Wheels, also does a Coast-to-Coast trip that I’ve always dreamed of going on since completing my California trip.
Although I’d love to participate in that Coast-to-Coast trip, I’d prefer to do it at a fairly leisurely pace; nothing like the speed and conditions the participants of the 2012 Race Across America (RAAM) event, “The World’s Toughest Bike Race”. Depending on your interest in cycling, you may not have heard of this race like you have the Tour de France coming up next month, but this race is absolutely intense! The race just concluded today with the winning team travelling from Oceanside, CA to Annapolis, MD in 5 days, 5 hours and 5 minutes. RIDING A BIKE ACROSS THE NATION IN A LITTLE OVER 5 DAYS!
I had the opportunity to literally ‘track” one of the teams that participated in this race using technology developed by FedEx called SenseAware®. The team was the Ohio CycleWorks team and they were riding to support Jake, a young patient at the Akron Children’s Hospital. You can read all about their experiences on the race on their https://senseaware.tumblr.com/ site. You can also find out more about the Ohio CycleWorks Charities group by visiting their website (www.ohiocycleworkscharities.org).
One of the members of the CycleWorks team was Scott Garchar. During his journey he was outfitted with a SenseAware® device from FedEx that reporting on his location, temperature, light, barometic pressure and relative humidity. At any time I could login to the SenseAware® site and find out this information. Alerts could have been configured to text me if changes in those areas went above or below a specified threshold. All pretty cool stuff to track the events of a bike race. But perhaps more impressive is that this same technology is available for tracking the details of your packages sent via FedEx.
SenseAware Tracks the Information Surrounding Your Shipment Not Just the Package Itself
This type of detailed and specific tracking information could become crucial for life-science companies, healthcare, aerospace and many others that need this type of real-time environmental information related to their shipment. You can also appreciate the tie-in between FedEx, Ohio CycleWorks and the Akron Children’s Hospital for also working with this type of technology.
SenseAware is a ï¬rst-of-its-kind service that provides near real-time access to your shipments’ vital statistics—and the ability to collaborate and share that information with your business partners. The service integrates an advanced multi-sensor device that travels inside your shipments with a powerful web-based application, enabling you to stay connected when contents are critical.
- Current location—Know where your shipments are in near real-time.
- Accurate temperature—Verify the temperature of sensitive shipping environments, and receive immediate notiï¬cation if they go out of a speciï¬ed range.
- Exposure to light—Recognize if your shipments have been opened or if their contents have been exposed to light.
- Relative humidity—Observe moisture levels inside your shipments.
- Barometric pressure—Detect changes in the levels of atmospheric pressure that your sensitive products are exposed to.
Pretty sweet functionality and we’ve come a long way in the information we can share quickly about the data around us. The SenseAware device transmits and shares this information through an easy to use and data-rich web interface for your organization and organization partners and vendors.
As I sit here on my couch, I continue thinking about my desire to travel on that coast-to-coast bike trip and now my brother and I have been talking about working on hiking the Appalachian Trail together. Collecting the information of my whereabouts on these kinds of adventures would be intriguing and interesting data to have at my fingertips. To think that same data could be available for any shipment sent via FedEx is already available today is quite impressive.
Disclosure: I received compensation from FedEx for covering the use of SenseAware® technology during the 2012 Race Across America. My ideas and opinions relayed in this blog post and any related Twitter discussions are my own and are not provided by FedEx or its affiliates and subsidiaries. www.momcentral.com/mcc