Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - PhasmaFOOD (Portable photonic miniaturised smart system for on-the-spot food quality sensing)

Teaser

\"Guaranteeing for food protection and authenticity is among the cornerstones of international trade in food and public health risk has been recognized as the main basis for trade restrictions. Exposure to biological and/or chemical hazards has created consumer mistrust to...

Summary

\"Guaranteeing for food protection and authenticity is among the cornerstones of international trade in food and public health risk has been recognized as the main basis for trade restrictions. Exposure to biological and/or chemical hazards has created consumer mistrust to governments and the food industry, a mistrust that is threatening to become a long-term problem. The awareness amongst EU governments, industries and consumers concerning food safety and authenticity is steadily increasing over the years as potential hazards can be due to the existing processing environment, which may accelerate or facilitate those biochemical changes.

Furthermore, the authenticity of European food produced with defined quality standards is a key expectation of consumers as well as a key selling point for the European agri-food economy. Additionally, food spoilage due to microbial activity, biological and chemical hazards throughout the food chain is one of the most significant threats to food security. It is sufficient to mention that every year unsafe food causes more than 600 million people to fall ill after consuming contaminated food, from which almost 420.000 die every year (a third of them young children).

Food quality monitoring in a reliable way has generated great concerns because current practices of assessment of food quality still rely heavily on regulatory inspection and sampling regimes. This approach cannot sufficiently guarantee consumer protection since 100% inspection and sampling is technically, financially and logistically impossible. Most of methods are time-consuming non-portable and provide retrospective information and thus they cannot be used on-line. There is also a need for instruments that can facilitate the prediction of the remaining shelf life of food products.

PhasmaFOOD is aiming at delivering an autonomous, multifunctional multi-sensor optical sensing device for the detection of food quality and safety issues such as food spoilage, adulteration and aflatoxins. The system is based on visible and near infrared spectroscopy technologies and is supported by an open software architecture to support highly differentiated applicative goals throughout the food supply chain. PhasmaFOOD will deliver fast characterisation of foods, encompassing an extendable framework for the deployment of smart chemometric algorithms, data fusion strategies and reference laboratory measurements.
In view of the above, the PhasmaFOOD objectives are the following:

Objective #1: To provide a miniaturized, multi-parameter and programmable sensing node for food spoilage (through microbial activity), food safety (i.e. mycotoxin detection) and adulteration, via the integration of heterogeneous vibrational spectroscopy (visible, fluorescence and near infrared), sensors.
Objective #2: To provide a smart system embedding detective and predictive capabilities by incorporating smart signal processing, data analytic models, communication enablers and smart algorithms.
Objective #3: To build food analysis platform hosting data sets for training and calibration of food analysis algorithms and providing proactive decision making deeper insight into patterns and correlations in sensory data.
Objective #4: To ensure manufacturability, reliability and cost‐effectiveness of the whole system for food spoilage, safety and adulteration sensing applications, targeting realistic business model analysis.
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Work performed

Within this period, progress was achieved in all WPs. Highlights include:
• Detailed definition of the target foods and types of measurements, with corresponding functionality requirements of the detection system.
• Market analysis and strategic planning of commercialisation approach.
• Design of sensing hardware and selection of sensor components: a UV-VIS spectrometer, a NIR spectrometer and a VIS board-level camera.
• Establishment of SOP both for IR spectroscopy, fluorescence spectroscopy and visible reflectance spectroscopy.
• First feasibility tests using single spectral systems (illumination+sensor) on use case 1 and 2 samples.
• Assessment of detection capability for Aflatoxin B1 from ppm to tens of ppb range.
• Set-up of a lighting concept within the WP2, based on the sensing requirements of UV-VIS spectrometer, NIR spectrometer and the VIS board-level camera.
• Electronic design of the near-sensing for the UV-VIS spectrometer and its hardware interface towards the main electronic board. The NIR spectrometer, which is being manufactured by partner IPMS, has received design adaptation.
• Design of first prototypes of electronic boards and electronic integration.
• Specification of PhasmaFOOD software architecture, software components, mobile application and PhasmaFOOD cloud platform database and decision making approaches.
• Specification of the security and privacy procedures and the software development and integration strategy.
• Manufacturing, assembly and laboratory testing of the optomechanical hardware of the sensing sub-unit, including all sensors and light sources in a robust 3D printed housing.
• Definition of the standard operating procedures for the PhasmaFOOD sensors, sampling strategies, data assessment and conclusions until M18 of the project.
• Development of multivariate analysis and data fusion strategies for each use case.
• Design and development of the laboratory measurements collection database, with specification of experimental data organization and database structure.
• First implementation of the software for the PhasmaFOOD smart system.
• Implementation of the main electronic board integrated inside the PhasmaFOOD sensing device, including the hardware and layout designs of the main electronic board.
• Implementation of embedded software for the PhasmaFOOD smart food analysis device.
• Implementation of all integration activities leading to the first PhasmaFOOD prototype.

Final results

Anticipated improvements of the State of the Art include the following:
• Integration of UV+VisFluorescence/VIS, VIS camera and NIR spectroscopy in a single portable, standalone device, i.e. without the need for further light sources.
• Development of a system (instrument+method) to detect in a fast and low cost way mycotoxin (in particular aflatoxin B1) contamination in the range of ppm (first, fast screening).
• PhasmaFOOD software system and functional platform and architecture which apply a novel approach for distributed data analysis and decision making. Each platform layer (embedded software, mobile application and cloud platform) perform assigned data preparation and analysis operations on collected measurements. .
• Data analysis playground as part of the cloud platform web dashboard which allow PhasmaFOOD system users to test different configurations of data analysis pipelines and assess performance of each step in data preprocessing and classification. This also enables users to validate and assess quality of collected data sets.
• Data fusion algorithms that integrate data from the 4 measurement methods (Fluorescence, VIS and NIR spectroscopy, VIS imaging) from a variety of sources (end users) and use cases in the food safety context.
• Electronic board hardware design with the capability of integrating three different sensing components (UV-VIS, NIR, micro camera) for food quality safety.

Website & more info

More info: http://www.phasmafood.eu/.