MediCare: Temperature, Time, Tracking

Built for the Physical Medicine outpatient clinic at St. Olavs Hospital, where storage of local-anaesthesia vials (lidocaine) was being lost to manual processes: handwritten dates on opened vials, once-daily fridge temperature checks, and easy-to-miss expiration on unopened stock. The three sub-systems each target one of those failure modes.

The temperature sub-system uses a BME680 sensor on a Raspberry Pi sampling every 10 seconds over i2c, writing to MySQL and serving a React + TypeScript dashboard via a NodeJS backend. A Python SMS service pages staff when the fridge drifts outside the 2–6 °C window, and the dashboard offers a downloadable weekly CSV.

The open-vial holder starts a 3-day countdown when a vial is placed and switches the slot's LED from green to red when usability expires, removing the need for handwritten dates entirely. The rotating rack reads expiration dates from QR codes on unopened vials and rotates the next-to-expire vial to the front, with per-slot LEDs flagging anything already expired.