Danish firm Blue Line releases tablet designed for cleanrooms

Blue Line, a Danish manufacturer of computers and monitors, has released a tablet for use in cleanrooms in pharmaceutical manufacturing.

Called CleanTablets, Blue Line’s cleanroom tablets are designed with the exacting standards of pharmaceutical cleanrooms in mind, where every activity must be weighed carefully to limit the build up of contaminating particles such as bacteria and dust. Blue Line CEO Niels Pederson says that “most existing tablets for sterile environments were designed for the healthcare industry.” This means that they can be wiped down quickly but cannot be disinfected using corrosive cleaning agents, which is necessary to prevent contamination. A contaminated batch of pharmaceuticals can cost millions in revenue.

Blue Line makes the CleanTablet using “engineering polymer”, a type of plastic often used in the aerospace industry. As such, they are lightweight, at least one-quarter the weight of competing tablets, which are typically made of stainless steel, a “pharmaceutical standard” due to their cleanability and durability. The CleanTablet is also devoid of creases where bacteria can hide and its touchscreens are sensitive enough to be used while wearing as many as 3 layers of gloves.

The CleanTablet eases many cleanroom tasks relating to documentation and data entry, such as allowing technicians to read manuals for pharmaceutical production, access or report data, and take photos or film manufacturing processes. Blue Line also foresees their use in areas like training and onboarding, such as by allowing workers to view video instructions of cleanroom practices, or to get acquainted with the cleanroom through Augmented or Virtual Reality technologies.

In designing the CleanTablet, Blue Line observed that tablets were already being used in cleanrooms, which are tending towards leaner practices and a focus on mobility. However, to be sufficiently waterproof, workers had to put them in plastic bags, which made them inconvenient and drastically reduced their lifespans.

In pharmaceutical manufacturing, the CleanTablet can function in a similar way to an inventory list: they can be linked to particular batches of drugs and then follow those batches all the way until they are shipped out to customers. This continuity limits the possibility for human error at each stage of the production process.

The CleanTablet continues Blue Line’s work in creating innovative IT solutions for the pharmaceutical and food sciences industries, being among the first organizations to begin creating computers, monitors, and workstations that cater to international standards of classification for cleanrooms. Like all its products, Blue Line is able to configure all CleanTablets to their customer’s specifications.

CleanTablets run on Windows 10 Pro and can connect to the internet via wifi and to other technologies using Bluetooth