Chill Route Compass

Chill Route Compass is an in-cab telematics and cold-chain IoT companion for heavy freight. It keeps vaccines, biologics and fresh cargo between 2 °C and 8 °C — readable in a two-second glance, even with no signal.

The problem

One failed reefer unit. One loose latch. A spoiled shipment in under an hour. Refrigerated cargo must stay between 2 °C and 8 °C, a single shipment can be worth over $100k, and drivers have no time to dig through complex software while on the road.

• 2–8 °C — the narrow safe range for vaccines, biologics and fresh cargo.
• $100k+ — the value of a single spoiled shipment.
• < 1 h — the time it takes for cargo to leave the safe range.

Design principles

Software that behaves like part of the truck.

• Bulky hardware and interface — built for gloves, glare and vibration, not a desk.
• The 2-second glance rule — a driver confirms cargo safety without reading a sentence.
• End-to-end IoT companion — from BLE sensor pairing to in-transit monitoring.
• Decoupled environment pods — temperature, humidity and door seal read independently.

Design process

From cab conditions to a live build, in four steps.

• Empathize & discover — riding along to understand real cab conditions.
• Define constraints — gloves, glare, dead zones and two-second glances.
• Low-fi wireframing — visual weight first, styling later.
• High-fi & prototype — a live, testable build on real hardware.

The in-transit hero telemetry monitor

• Hero typographic readout — the cargo temperature dominates the screen.
• Rolling 60-second sparkline — trend at a glance, no chart-reading required.
• Decoupled environment pods — humidity and door seal sit beside the temperature.
• Persistent connectivity pill — Online · BLE status is always visible.

BLE pairing and pre-trip diagnostics

• Hardware-first modular cards — each sensor (cab gateway, reefer unit) gets its own card.
• Pre-trip live graph — signal strength and battery confirmed before departure.
• High-confidence action zone — one clear primary action per screen.
• 4-step setup stepper — pairing a new sensor takes under a minute.

When thresholds break, the interface changes mode

A breached threshold turns the whole interface into an alarm state — no hunting for what went wrong.

• Cognitive triage — the problem, the cause and the action, in that order.
• Noticeable 3-step protocol — check door seal, verify reefer unit, silence when resolved.
• Fail-safe press-and-hold — alarms can't be dismissed by an accidental tap.

Tested where it will be used: in the cab

Testing happened in real cab conditions — direct sunlight glare, thick work gloves and mountain dead zones — and the interface held up: glance time under two seconds, zero cloud dependency, and one-to-one parity with the hardware sensors.

Outcomes

• < 2 s glance time — drivers confirm cargo safety without stopping.
• 0 cloud dependency — offline-first UX keeps working through tunnels and dead zones.
• 1:1 hardware parity — the interface mirrors the physical sensors exactly.