21 January 2014

Engineers in Italy are attempting to develop cyborg plant sensors that harness natures ability to detect environmental changes.

The team from the University of Rome plans is building electronic devices that can read the electrical signals generated by living plants as they react to changes in their environment, as part of Plants Employed As Sensing Devices (PLEASED) project funded by the EUs FP7 programme.

Although these plant-borg sensors are unlikely to be as accurate as artificial ones, they could be better at monitoring multiple changes such as humidity and temperature at the same time with a simple, cheap and robust device, the researchers claim.

They could be used for monitoring pollution of the environment, for example, or acid rain, said project coordinator Prof Andrea Vitaletti in a statement from the European Research Media Centre.

A very practical application we have in mind is to use plants as certification devices of organic farming. By observing the signals generated by the plants, it should be possible to determine whether or not the farmer has used adequate chemicals.

If you want to find out the same thing with artificial devices, you would need quite a number of them.

Source: PLEASED

The researchers have connected signal-harvesting devices to sample plants using needle electrodes.

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'Cyborg plants' to help watch out for environmental damage