Given the limitation of two hands and one brain per scientist, experimental science often ends up messier and less controlled than the polished impressions conveyed by SOPs, protocols, methods, reports, lab notebooks, or popular culture. While ELNs are seen as a significant advancement in lab data capture, they don’t fully address the operational burdens and risks of misinterpretation. That’s why we developed Lumi.
Lumi uses visual data from modular cameras and cutting-edge AI technology to easily capture, analyse and contextualise operational information that would otherwise require human intelligence and input. Our mission is to get scientists back to science, significantly accelerate R&D by doing so, and help get modern medicines to the market faster to cure patients.
In this piece, we’ll compare six essential features of a typical ELN data capture approach with Lumi to highlight the differences and showcase how Lumi provides a more effective solution.
Data entry method
| Typical ELN | Lumi |
| Manual – even if simplified by templates, forms or dropdowns, still requires human effort. | Automated – operational AIs analysing video streams, with no human effort required. Lumi’s logs can be customised to any format requirements, so data will be structured and accurately timestamped at the moment of capture. |
Data accuracy and integrity
| Typical ELN | Lumi |
| Some ELNs can be integrated with instruments, enabling automated data capture. Additional benefit, compared to a traditional lab notebook, is mobile accessibility that simplifies data capture during experiments. Audit trail provides a detailed view into how data is entered and edited. However, integrations aren’t available for a 100% of existing instruments and sometimes are quite tricky even when good on paper, and scientists still have to enter data manually and disrupt experiment flow. | Lumi’s visual intelligence works everywhere software won’t, so you don’t have to worry about API calls or incompatible devices, anything that’s visible is actionable. All data is captured automatically, with date/time stamps and the audit trail is enhanced by video as evidence. Lumi also won’t get tired or forget anything, there’s no place for subjectivity in the process. |
Collaboration
| Typical ELN | Lumi |
| Most ELNs work well with data sharing and version control, giving researchers the possibility to collaborate in an efficient way. | Lumi takes the best out of ELN collaboration approach and adds video streams with highlighted events that allow to avoid any scheduling conflicts to discuss the data – scientists can check the stream and see for themselves. |
Data analysis and insight generation
| Typical ELN | Lumi |
| ELNs have to rely on humans to enter as much data as possible for analysis. | Lumi captures everything, and even the smallest differences which may seem trivial to the human eye are seen and considered during the insight generation process. |
Compliance and security
| Typical ELN | Lumi |
| Most ELNs do help to improve data integrity, which results in compliance enhancement, however, relying on human effort and manual data entry won’t allow to achieve a 100%. In terms of security, both ELNs and Lumi have robust policies in place to ensure that data is protected well. | 0% data loss as the most solid basis of data integrity, leading to simplified compliance processes – whether things go wrong or right, everything is logged and reported with visual proof and accurate timestamps. |
Productivity and process improvement
| Typical ELN | Lumi |
| ELNs help to optimise many processes within a lab setting, but the burden of data entry and a need to constantly multi-task is still on humans. | When it comes to advancing science, simply optimising isn’t good enough. Lumi gives scientists their hands back, and adds an extra pair(s) of eyes so that they can focus on the actual science, rather than manual data capture. |
We aim to take the pressure of data capture completely off scientists, to relieve the cognitive burden and increase the quality & quantity of scientific output and experiment data. ELNs are good, but in terms of lab data capture, we’ve developed something better.
To learn more about Lumi, you can visit this page, request a demo or simply get in touch via contact@lumi.systems