Self-refrigerating shipping box

The Ember Cube is a digital shipping box that has cloud-based temperature reporting, GPS location tracking, and return-to-sender technology. The box uses an onboard cellular radio to report real-time temperature and humidity tracking and GPS location information that can be viewed on a cloud-based dashboard.

Through its partnership with Ember, Cardinal Health will leverage its technology infrastructure and national presence as a distributor of pharmaceutical and medical products to hospitals, pharmacies, and physician clinics to deploy Ember’s cold chain technology, ensuring patients can access life-saving therapies.

Ember’s return-to-sender technology allows each Ember Cube to be reused hundreds of times, reducing waste, and eliminating single-use packaging. Once a healthcare provider has received its shipment of medicine, the Ember Cube uses its built-in cellular radio to communicate with the shipping service to schedule a pick-up, automatically providing its current GPS location.

Once the Ember Cube notifies the shipping service that it is ready to be picked up, it generates a new shipping label on its e-ink screen and is returned to Cardinal Health’s distribution centre.

Cardinal Health plans to launch a customer pilot for the Ember Cube in 2022.