Perishable Shipment Tracker: Using IoT, Web Bluetooth and Blockchain to Raise Accountability and Lower Costs in the Perishable Shipment Process

Abstract

Just like many other fields of application, IoT and blockchain have not left the perishable shipment industry untouched, and these technologies have already improved the overall quality of perishable goods by bringing advances to the shipping process. However, there is still a great deal of room for improvement, especially with regard to making IoT sensors more cost-effective, improving the accuracy of IoT sensors, and raising the accountability of perishable shipment actors both through GPS tracking and through the use of blockchain. My thesis project has several goals: to provide a versatile, easy-to-use application to suppliers who want to deploy sensors to track their shipments, to add an additional level of accountability by incorporating blockchain in the application, and to examine the use of Espruino devices and Web Bluetooth as a way to maintain the current level of IoT sensor accuracy while reducing the costs of these sensors, and also as a way to allow suppliers to easily use a variety of sensors. As a result, my project consists of two primary components, a mobile-centered serverless web application called the PST (Perishable Shipment Tracker) and a temperature/GPS sensor device made up of a puck.js Espruino unit combined with the GY-NEO6MV2 6M GPS NEO by Ublox.