About Client

Mentemedical is a award winning biotech startup leveraging IoT and AI technologies to help hospitals optimise instrument inventory.

Problem Statement

Mentemedical was using ThingMagic RFID Reader Module for their product. The Reader Module is responsible for reading the RFID tags attached to the surgical instruments. Mentemedical uses the data from the Reader Module to track the instruments and provide insights to the hospitals.

ThingMagic’s Reader Module had several issues:

  • It was not reliable. It would often stop working and required a manual restart.
  • It was comparatively expensive.
  • Compliance with the ThingMagic’s Reader Module was difficult.

Mentemedical wanted to switch to a more reliable and cost effective RFID Reader Module. Their research led them to Chainway’s RFID Reader Module.

We had to change their software to work with Chainway’s Reader Module.

Our Solution

We started by understanding the existing software. We found that the software was written in Go and was running on a Raspberry Pi. It had Go bindings for ThingMagic’s Reader Module.

We decided to deliver the solution as soon as possible and not reinvent the wheel. So we decided to use the existing software as a base and make the required changes.

Implementation

We isolated the code responsible for interacting with the Reader Module. We then created a new package for Chainway’s Reader Module. We made sure that the new package had the same interface as the old package. This allowed us to use the new package without making any changes to the existing code.

We studied the demo code given by Chainway team to understand how to use it. We were able to get a shared library for the Reader Module. We created a Go bindings for the shared library.

These were plugged into the reader client.

We then tested the new software with Chainway’s Reader Module. We found that the new software was working as expected.

Challenges

Chainway is a Chinese company. Their documentation was not in English. The demo code was for Java and C# which used more abstracted libraries than shared library.

We had to decomplile the Java code to understand how to use the shared library. We then had to write Go bindings for the shared library.

We were targeting Raspberry Pi arm32. We had significant delays in getting the shared library for arm32, as Chainway support was not very responsive.

Results

We were able to successfully switch the RFID Reader Module of Mentemedical from ThingMagic to Chainway. The new software is more reliable and cost effective.