Airaware

As the population of this country is big and its food culture widely diversified, food safety is a huge subject in china. As for many other topics, Hong Kong and Shenzhen are mixed together and specific rules are made up for food safety. The border from Hong Kong to Shenzhen is sensible, as the mixing of the cities must be simple and evident. On the contrary it must not be too simple as the border gives entry to the entire country. The one country two systems is very visible with the food restrictions and the relations between both parties. On one side Hong Kong is importing 60% of its drinking water from China and on the other side Honk Kong benefits the liberal market independence and its own judicial system and thus more imported goods. When entering Shenzhen, it is explicitly noted not to import raw meat and no egg-based products.

In addition to the water import, the Hong Kong department for food and health declares that more than 90 % of the food is imported (1) and mainly from Chinese mainland. Hence, the quality of these imported food directly affects the health of Hong Kong citizens. Nevertheless, Hong Kong is the top food safety city in China thanks to investments in researches and to use of food controls measures that allows quick detection of unhealthy food, there is even a dedicated center (2). 

The center for food safety gives information about the restrictions that are in place in Hong Kong. The last restrictions were made about egg products because of the recent avian influenza. There has not been any restriction for fish from japan because of Fukushima.

In Shenzhen, the restriction are dictated by the Chinese government as any other city in China, the restrictions are therefore less specific. There is actually a system for food quality which has been implemented for restaurants to give the customer an information about the status of restaurants. This system requires restaurant to be checked more often if their grade is bad.

To upgrade food safety standards in the Chinese mainland, PolyU’s Food Safety and Technology Research Centre established a laboratory in Shenzhen in 2011 (4). Accredited by the Shenzhen Government, the laboratory has recently been elevated to a Key Laboratory to conduct food safety testing and research. Each year,  they gather about 5’000 food samples from Hong Kong, Shenzhen and Guangzhou restaurants, then they perform research and tests over these samples in order to find eventual bacterias and drugs resistance against their growth. Indeed, major bacterial pathogens that possibly cause food poisoning and infection in those three regions can thus be predicted.

The continuous growth of research centers let citizens become more aware about food safety issues, in fact is not that rarely, In Shenzhen restaurants, to find people eating with gloves when they have to use their hands to eat.  Waiters bring them to the table with the food and you can wear them whenever you want to.

As the main difference to Hong Kong, Shenzhen has a food supply which is given by the same country and also local production in the province. This also gives the possibility to have local specialties like the salt-cooked pigeon or the chicken feet soup. For the similarities between the two cities regarding food safety, both city restaurant like to expose the meat on spikes to give the client some insight (many ducks hanging at windows) and some fishes as well, despite the great heat. Furthermore, the street food is very present in both cities, being a typical eating habit for locals.

Food safety is generally a big deal in both cities, more than any other part of the world because of multiple outbreaks of contaminated food in the past, thus the creation of the food safety center (3), which prevent now the risks and decreased the outbreaks.

Some of our colleagues had a first-hand experience of bad food safety and got sick for few days after eating in a small restaurant along the street in Shenzhen. 

After eating, we got a look to the place where cooks were preparing food and it didn’t seem very healthy. 

If we had seen before this situation, probably we wouldn’t have eaten there. So it’s absolutely recommended checking the quality and the grade of the restaurant before deciding to eat there.

References:

(1)http://www.fhb.gov.hk/download/press_and_publications/otherinfo/110318_food_supply_faq/e_food_supply_faq.pdf

(2)http://www.cfs.gov.hk/eindex.html

(3)http://www.scmp.com/article/512864/dedicated-food-safety-centre-proposed

(4)https://www.polyu.edu.hk/cpa/excel/en/201501/viewpoint/v1/index.html

Authors:

Alessandro Mascheroni

Bruno Produit

On July 25th, our exploration of Shenzhen started with the Huangqiangbei electronics market. We set off at 09:30 in the morning to get there. We were amazed by the size of the markets (there are six or seven buildings, and it took us two hours just explored two) and the variety of the items they are offering. For team Ticino, they found Arduino mini pro board offered in Huaqiangbei for 13 RMB each piece (the original one was 12 USD!).

At 12:45, we went to the HAX accelerator. An incubator place where offers seed funding, mentoring and office and lab space. They in return take equity from the incubating company. They started in 2013 and are the first hardware incubator in Shenzhen. They chose Shenzhen as the location for the ultimate supply chain, with a belief: No prototype is manufacturable until you actually step foot in a factory. We pitched our three projects and got some interesting feedbacks. For more information about HAX click: https://hax.co.

After visiting HAX, we went to the X.factory or Chaihuo maker space at 16:00. With the introduction given by Violet, we learned that there are more 200 maker spaces in Shenzhen. X.factory is one of them and started from 2011. What they do there are basically supporting the makers and training the students. They have many facilities like 3D printers, wood cutters, laser cutters, lathes and so on. After joining X.factory as a member, you can have free access to those facilities and the mentoring from the trainers there. For more information about X.factory click: http://www.chaihuo.org/xfactory/.

After the introduction, we listened to the speech given by Jianshan about his Crazy car and Momo: the interactive projector projects. Then we finished the day by arranging the engineering jobs and design and business jobs that to be done in the next days.

This morning was ok, we didn’t need to rush. We just recieved few instructions and split in three teams which each had one designer . Each team went to the location by themselves. The first team went to the Museum Mplus in Cyberport, the second went in the Hong-Kong design institut ( HKDI) and the last team went in the school of creative media.

After the presentations we were free to have lunch together with our teams and only had to meet everybody else at the Energy Plaza to visit Joker, a swiss company. This guy (add name) started his company in Switzerland,  after this training as a merchant at the Coop. After few years of business he realised that the production cost in Switzerland are getting out of hand and he transferred part of his company to china. In the seventies he bought the license to create a the slimy toy , using the concept of connected polymers. Starting from this simple product he found ways to extend this concept into different ranges of products like other toys but also medical, cleaning tools etc.

After the presentation, some of us decided to visit  a nearby temple. It was a temple with the deification of two well known men of China, a warrior and a writer. You can pray them to be strong enough to fight  and smart enough to avoid fighting . The temple is near central, so we were amazed by the contrast between this old and small temple and the enormous  skyscrapers all around it.

After the visit, we just return to the meeting point to take the bus with the others. We wanted to go to the peak. The traffic was dense and the driver completely crazy. the journey to the peak lasted one hour. We went to the peak in the evening to see the view by night. The place was amazing, full of chinese people as an echo of the view down filled of tall skyscrapers. All those building were shining and offered to us a complete scene of a galaxy, an artificial one, made by humans, but still, it was a galaxy for sure.

Then, we decided to return in central. We had split in two groups. The first one decided to go by foot through the mountain, the others just took the taxi. Back in central, we went out and enjoyed a good beer.

Hi everybody,

We are working hard on the connectivity between the telephone and the sensor, the first iteration of the PCB and also on the first prototype for the general form of the object.

We realized that we will need to do additional iterations on both the PCB and the object to find a pleasant form that will work for our target group.

Dear all,

During week 14, we managed to finish the PCB design of our device, and we are producing it in this week. We also did the product design according to the size of PCB and sensors.

Our business guy is trying to estimate the manufacturing cost based on the BOM and how the cost are scaling.

Cheers,

Team Ticino

After the second milestone meeting, we received some valuable suggestions from our instructors. Our next steps will be:

• Focus on the industrial design;
• BlueTooth communication between the device and the smartphone;
• Make Unique-Selling-Point(USP) more visible;
• Improve the visual design of the interface;
• Try to identify the strategy for future data analysis;
• Start to build the project webpage;

In the team meeting of this week, we communicated the design of wireframes the application, clarified some open question about the physical components, and the presentation of the data to the user via the map.

Cheers,
Ticino Team

Hi everyone,

This last week before the Easter break, we are very motivated because our project begins to take shape. Our software engineer finished coding the core functionalities of the backend, now it is possible to completely manage our database through our API. Now he is starting to set up the frontend environment.
For the design part, we reviewed the wire-frames after received some feedback from our supervisor:

After the Easter break we’ll have a meeting with all our supervisors in order to take stock of the situation before MS2.

Happy holiday to everybody!!

Ticino Team.

Hi everyone,

This week we continued coding the backend part of our device, we implemented different core functionalities that will allow our Android application to interact with the database and manage data. Now there’s the possibility to add new user (I.E parents) to the database and for each of them add new child and event with the related pollution and gps values. Our software engineer keep working hard in order to implement strong and safety code.
Last week we presented the wireframes to the supervisors and during this week we are incorporating their feedback to finalize the output.

Regarding the Hardware part, we tested the GP-735T GPS receiver. It receives the location and timestamp accurately outdoors. The signal weakens quickly when go indoors. The next step will be storing both the dust sensor measures and GPS information into the EEPROM memory.

Cheers,

Ticino Team.

Hi everyone,

As the days pass, we become increasingly aware of our device final functions and possibilities.

We are now building an environmental monitoring device that detects the particle level in certain time interval combined with GPS information and the timestamp, these data are temporarily stored in the device memory and will be synchronise with the application when bluetooth communication is established. The device also has the instant indication of the particle level with the RGB LED on it. The device is designed for kids so it’s featured to make them like to have it.

We also had a discussion on how to display the aggregated data in a heatmap  (as in the title image) with all the values from the sensors. We realised that this would add value for our users but it would also require a sophisticated model for the interpolation between map quadrants.

In this week, we have received all physical components and we did the first tests. On March 31, we had one prototyping meeting with experts from USI and SUPSI to discuss how to build up the electrical hardware of our device. We decided the PCB building process will have 3 steps:

1. PCB build the EEPROM memory to test; Soldering the GPS receiver with the breakout board and test; Calibrate the dust sensor and find ways to remove false positive values(3D print a case with ventilator or find a new sensor model); Breadboard test them all and send the result to mobile app via Bluetooth.
2. Build the power management module and optimise the use of power; Combine the modules onto one PCB board and make it.
3. Make the optimised PCB design and make it final.

Finally, we wrote a list of front-end functionalities in order to clear up both the application mock-up and the operations that the back-end should provide.

See you soon,

Ticino team.

Hi everyone!

During this week we finally received the hardware components we ordered. So we did some preliminary test with them. The sensor model is Shinyei PPD42NS, an optical aerosol sensor based on the principle of particle light scattering. It consists of a light chamber that routes air past a light emitting diode and photo-diode detector that measures the near-forward scattering properties of particles in the air. The sensor measures the dust particle counts in 0.01 cubic feet. And the usual measure for PM10 and PM2.5 pollution is the milligrams/cubic meter. To find a way to convert this two measures, we find this article from NASA: https://spacemath.gsfc.nasa.gov/earth/10Page104.pdf We will continue to extract a formula to apply on our calculating model.

*Inside the sensor

*Testing the Shinyei PPD42NS dust sensor

*Some measurement records from the dust sensor

We also came up with a further idea that could bring added value to our project, it consists in aggregate together all data received from all devices from all parents smartphones and use them to build an heat map where everyone can check the pollution value in different positions of the planet. Of course the realization of this additional idea depends very much on how successful our idea will be and how much diffuse it will be, but we are optimistic about our project 🙂

For this reason we had also to figure out a way to store and manage our data in a clever and quick way in order to have good performance when data will be queried.

For the business part, we have realized an interview grid and we are trying to understand how to administer it to our potential early adopters; it’s not an easy task because we believe would be appropriate to interview people who are truly facing air pollution issue, I.E. Chinese People; more specifically we have to interview chinese parents. At once, we are working on competitive landscape so that we can understand who our competitors are and what they offer.

Stay tuned for more updates!

Cheers,

Ticino team

Hi everyone,

This week, after some discussion into the group, we decided to modify the database structure, and our software engineer continued coding the back-end part of our project.

After we collaborated on the inspiration board (available at this link https://amb-1.com/11661865 ), we created our first round of sketches about the product. We envision the modular object that consists of a baseplate with all the electronic components and a screwable extension with is partly transparent and is going to be illuminated by the LED on the baseplate. The extension is designed to give the product a personal touch that follow through the childhood.

Moreover we started thinking about user interviews. Given the fact our main target are chinese parents, we encountered some difficulties managing the interview, because we can’t meet them in person. We are thinking about using different strategies like online surveys, social network and of course to interview people who Yang is in contact with.

Cheers,

Ticino team

Hi everyone,

This third week our main target was to set up the environment needed to implement solutions we selected in the previous week.
We sent out the order of all electronic elements that we need to build our PCB. We arranged all software development tools that we’ll use during the whole project : code repository, database and we started coding the server part, you can find our online web page here

https://ticinoteam.herokuapp.com/

Moreover, we designed the database structure that will contain data about our users and pollution values coming from the parent’s smartphone application.

Stay tuned for more updates!

Cheers,

Ticino team

During this week, we continued our work on designing the air pollution detection device.

We had a meeting with one electronics expert at USI to discuss what is the best hardware solution for our design. We talked through the sensor selection, wireless communication selection and the power management. After the meeting, we created the functional block diagram of the product.

Based on this we fill in the material shopping list with all the components needed. After purchase these materials we will start our breadboard testing work.

In addition, with regards to Software engineering, after a lot of discussions we definitely selected the general architecture and technologies we are going to use in implementation step. We chose programming languages to use for back end, front end and for the communications with the firmware,moreover we had a meeting with a Professor expert in data management at SUPSI university, thanks to which we were able to select the best solution for our database architecture.

Our path to the final device is still very long, but we are more motivated than ever.

Cheers,

Ticino team