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Pneumatic Tube Communication In Hospitals
blee37 sends along a writeup from the School of Medicine at Stanford University on their pneumatic tube delivery system, used for sending atoms not bits. Such systems are in use in hospitals nationwide; the 19th-century technology is enhancd by recent refinements in pneumatic braking. "Every day, 7,000 times a day, Stanford Hospital staff turn to pneumatic tubes, cutting-edge technology in the 19th century, for a transport network that the Internet and all the latest Silicon Valley wizardry can't match: A tubular system to transport a lab sample across the medical center in the blink of an eye."
So the point of this article is that physical tasks, like plumbing or carrying infected blood, can't be done electronically ?!?!
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
The bandwidth sucks.
I guess the only question is... why don't you take a look at TFA and get all your questions answered, instead of rushing here to try for a FP?
Experience teaches only the teachable. -AH
James-Bond those urine samples.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
The ultra-modern pharmacy in the local town also uses pneumatic delivery for prescription drugs. You present your prescription at the counter, and the attendant checks it, then keys in the appropriate codes on the terminal. The pills/potion/whatever arrives via pneumatic tube while the instructions & labels are being printed. This is faster then the previous method where the same attendant would have to walk off and fetch the prescription materials.
Some banks also use pneumatic conveyance to send currency between the counters and the vault.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
To help alert employees to the arrival of containers, the system has more than three dozen different combinations of chiming tones.
I wonder which engineer thought that would be a good idea.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
I think most if not all hospitals have this tech.
The station(s) go offline, and service personel come and fix it... parts of the network going offline is not an unusual event. Unlike the 19th century tech, these packet (plastic canister) routed pneumatic tube systems lack humans at the core of packet routing.
From a volunteer's point of view at a non-Stanford hospital, the IT integration was less than stellar. Maybe Stanford has done some work in that area, or maybe this is just astroturfing by a pneumatic tube company.
... Sen. Ted Stevens.
This is my opinion. To make sure you don't steal it, it's covered by the DMCA.
You must be new here.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
When the register has too much cash or needs change they just tube it over. There's also at least one pharmacy which has people processing prescriptions at terminals, and storage below from where the drugs are tubed over. If it works, don't fix it I say.
Oh, and here = Helsinki, Finland.
.: Max Romantschuk
For that matter, how much information can you send if you load up a 16-Gb USB drive (or a few) and send them off in a tube?
You have a last mile (or last metre) problem there though. Getting the data through the tube will take seconds. Minutes at most. 16GB through USB2 will take a few minutes even if you actually do get the maximum theoretical throughput.
There has never been a more appropriate time for this response: WHOOSH! (as the parcel goes by in the tube)
Both Berlin and Paris had a networks with a total length of more than 400km.
obvious link
I found the article mildly interesting but the lack of details disappointing. They only mention things like switching points and waiting areas in passing. It would've been a great article if they'd talked about the specific tech - I know it's old tech, but most of us have had little to no exposure to it (I've been to banks that use it at their drive-through windows... that's about it). For example: there are switches; is there any sort of prioritization protocol, or are the switches simply for collision prevention?
#DeleteChrome
I for one welcome our new tubular overlords.
...and I am right behind you with Tubular Bells on.
Why is this news? Seriously, old technology lives on if it's useful. Even sometimes if it's not.
I think the newsworthiness of this is that it offers evidence of a technological "plus ca change ..." Put another way, instead of looking like Star Trek or a Spielberg movie, the future will more likely resemble what we see in Brazil.
They are pretty common in the UK, in all sort of industries.
Tesco supermarket uses them in some stores for moving cash to tills, and they are widely used in Hospitals.
There is one great, if slightly lengthy story that a friend tells, from when she was working in a hospital in Western Scotland a few years ago, I'll try to recount it best as I can.
A patient who has Hepatitis and Epilepsy is admitted to the hospital, he had a fit, and his Dog bit his ear off while he was fitting. So he came to hospital with his ear in his pocket. He was treated in A&E (UK ER) and sent up to the surgical department. His Ear though was wrapped up and put in a tube, however before the doctor could tap in the destination, the pod whizzed off. The hepatitis positive ear was not found for several days (is this just a bit error rate?), as it was quiet a big hospital with a lot of tubes. It could have been worse, as the ear was not intended to be sown back on, but just photographed and incinerated. The doctor who put the ear in the pod was known as Stupid Dave before the incident, but I'm sure this didn't help him shake of the moniker. The worst thing is, most people just ask what happened to the dog.
You don't get that with TCP/IP
in australia coles and woolworths as well as target and big w, etc. all use pneumatic tubs for cash.
No. The internet is a series of tubes, and this pneumatic tube communication system is like a convoy of trucks on the highway.
And yes, the convoy of trucks is now connected via Wi-Fi, so these trucks are like the internet.
at the hospital at which I worked, you could select the origin station as the destination, and the tube system would dutifully take the carrier all the way around and back. so you could send yourself something, and receive it a few minutes later. I loved sending stuff to myself in the (near) future.
(and no couriers available to fall back on)
Luckily, they have plenty of *general purpose* organic units to fall back on, which, while less efficient than the tube network, can quickly transport the physical objects. Just because no one has "courier" in their job description, doesn't mean there are no available couriers.
Place a stack of DVDs in a pneumatic device and you can pump data faster than on any type of existing system of delivery.
actually some pneumatic tube systems have procedures for a stuck cylinder, by sending a second heavier cylinder, or by increasing the pressure to higher than normal levels, either way clearing the tube.
as in Futurama: Governor lady said "I'm sending in more trains!"
I used such tubes all day, every day, for several years, doing Neutron Activation Analysis. The samples were loaded three per tube, known as rabbits. They went into the slot, closed and blew down the outside wall of the building, underground, and then up into the core of our TRIGA reactor. There they got neutrons of various energies for anywhere from 0.05 to 2-3 seconds, and then they blasted back to me. Behind the shields I removed the samples and placed them at the gamma detectors--moving very fast. Counting gammas took anywhere from seconds to days, depending upon type and elements.
We proved the existence of the Northern Hemisphere ozone depletion with 800 samples, and several of my graduates got PhDs. Another project showed trade routes extant through northern Italy at the construction of the Colliseum.
Once in a while a rabbit would get stuck. A particularly hot one did, right at the corner of my lab. We timed that test so no one else was in the building, and it got so hot it wouldn't come back past the tube joint. If I hadn't known just where the 36" wrench was, the building could have been badly contaminated, and would've shut down, as in national news. I got it out without too much exposure, and was offered the job as building manager later.
Another time a sample exploded while removing it from a rabbit, showering my nose with hot dust. I still get stray hairs growing there...
I thought the headline of the article was actually a joke; these systems are found in almost all major hospitals. There are companies that will install them:
http://www.swisslog.com/index/hcs-index/hcs-systems/hcs-pts/hcs-pts-translogic.htm
this is an established industry, and nothing new... Each hospital in the conglomerate that I work in uses a pneumatic tube system.
Weird that somebody picked up this Stanford "press release" and found it suitable for Slashdot...
Slashdotter, ID #101. UIDs are in binary, right?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I've occasionally thought it would be interesting to use this kind of technology for home plumbing. For example, when you turn on your sink and ask for hot water, instead of having a continuous flow in a pipe from the hot water heater to the sink (which wastes a lot of energy), why not use a pneumatic tube system to deliver a packet of hot water to the sink?
Note that the same tubes could be used for delivering hot water an cold water, and taking away waste water? (You'd have separate containers, of course, for fresh water and waste water).
You could do cool things with a pneumatic packet-switched water network. For instance, it would be easy to add a storage tank and route shower waster water to the tank, and then from there to the toilets for flushing.
And I bet with some clever design, you could make it so the pneumatic tube system could double as a centralized vacuum system for house cleaning.
Hey, it's not the network's fault if there's a bottleneck at the customer's site.
The bandwidth is great. You can send a 1TB hard drive down the tube.
It's the latency that sucks.
Don't try to play a first person shooter, or stream a video through the tube.
I worked at a hospital with a pretty complicated series of tubes. Even after using it hundreds of times, I still thought it was totally sweet.
Yes, tubes DO get clogged, and pretty regularly. We fixed it by calling maintenance and saying "tube's down". I think they reversed the polarity or something. If something was extra-stuck it could be down for an hour or so, so they probably have access points or something if reversing didn't work.
If you use a damaged capsule it can end up clogging the tube, so it's not a good idea. Capsules will get stuck if it's not closed all the way (you try to squeeze stuff too much stuff into it). If you put something in wrapped in a plastic bag (always a good idea with IV bags and things that can break) and a bit of the bag is sticking out it can clog the tubes, too.
You don't generally put in things that can break easily -- you wouldn't generally send glass bottles, but vials are okay if you throw some padding around them. They don't stop gently, it's a pretty good thud even with whatever braking they use so you make sure the contents will survive impact before you send it. Usually you'll double-bag for biologic and chemo products. If a capsule gets contaminated with bio or chemo there are cleaning procedures. Generally it's just the capsule that gets contaminated. There are probably procedures for shutting down and cleaning the tube system after contamination. It was one of those things that you always think could happen and how much it would suck, but it didn't happen when I worked there.
If a critical sample gets stuck or destroyed, then tough cookies. There will always be noob mistakes.
True story: the tube system we used had a function to send tubes out if you had an excess of empty tubes. You push a code and it takes it -somewhere-. Then if you need a tube, you push a code and it sends you an empty one. I don't know how that works, but I always imagined that it involved monkeys.
"Every day, 7,000 times a day, Stanford Hospital staff turn to pneumatic tubes, cutting-edge technology in the 19th century, for a transport network that the Internet and all the latest Silicon Valley wizardry can't match: A tubular system to transport a lab sample across the medical center in the blink of an eye."
This article might be interesting if you are, say, 15. But they were (and still are) used in banks, the post office, supermarkets and anywhere else people need to transport small packages and money in a complex. Look around next time you are out in the world and you will likely see a few of these tubes.
How about an article on another archaic, 19th-century piece of technology that works better than any modern Silicon Valley wizardry: the internal combustion engine. I look forward to the one about the bicycle too!
*whoosh*