Vitralogy — Helping to Fight for Public Health

Vitralogy is an end-to-end automation solution. It helps building owners to stay compliant with cooling towers maintenance rules & regulations and, doing this, avoid outbreaks of Legionella — a bacteria, which can cause a severe, often fatal type of pneumonia.

The bacteria spreads through the inhalation of water droplets containing it and can breed in cooling towers. The latter are constructions, which serve air-conditioning systems of 5000+ buildings in NYC — from condominiums to hotels and hospitals. Legionnaires’ disease death rate is 10% on average, and to prevent its outbreaks cooling towers should be properly maintained.

Project background

In 2015, after the deadly Legionnaires’ outbreak in Bronx, where 12 people died, the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene enacted Local Law 77. It set out maintenance rules for all cooling towers in the city.

But, although the measures were assumed, two years later, in 2017, Legionella outbreaks still repeated. The matter is that preventing Legionella’s breeding in cooling towers objectively requires following a very tight schedule of maintenance & testing activities.

The just another Legionella outbreak on Long Island in 2017 led our clients to a thought that the Local Law 77 compliance is too complicated to meet. They decided to help it.

Solution

The solution includes two .NET-based apps — web and mobile. Together they provide a simple path to compliance by automating cooling towers’ maintenance activities:

1. Performing pre-scheduled system checks.
2. Capturing and storing the results of the checks, tests and corrective actions.

There are two types of users of the system: building owners & managers (Customers) on the one hand, and water treatment vendors (Vendors) on the other. When the clients came to us, they already had the web app. It was a full-featured app, exploited by both sides, but it had a substantial limitation: during routine checks of cooling towers the water treatment professionals had to collect data on the paper blanks, and then manually enter it to the web app.

Sibers Team has developed a mobile app, using Xamarin, which supplements the web one.

This mobile app allows vendors to check in, review schedule of jobs, take photos, complete checklists, record corrective actions, enter conclusions, and then save all the data — everything right in the time of checking the cooling towers. The data could be saved even in offline mode, if there is no Internet connection at the moment. It will be synchronized with the server-side when the Internet connection appears, and customers will have immediate access to the info via the web app.

Results

Ensuring full control and visibility of the work, which is needed to be and which has already been performed, the app serves two purposes. Helping New York City to fight for public health, the solution simultaneously accomplishes an earthbound business task — it allows building owners to avoid financially significant penalties, staying compliant with the city’s Local Law 77.