WatchPlant project

WatchPlant is a HORIZON four-year project started in January 2021. It will develop a new biohybrid system technology, a wireless wearable selfpowered sensor for in-situ monitoring of urban environments. This system equips urban biological organisms -plants- with Artificial Intelligence (AI) to create a smart sensor for measuring both, environmental parameters and the responding physiological state of plants, in a very early stage by the use of a barely explored fluid, phloem sap, in combination with chemical, and physical sensors.

The aim is to measure several plants initially in the same room under the same conditions such as temperature, light or geomagnetic field. For this purpose, 4 prototypes were built, each consisting of a plant and a measuring unit. The measuring unit contains the sensors, which are attached to the plant, and a Rasperry Pi controller, which cyclically receives the data from the sensors and controls and monitors the entire measuring process.

It will be integrated into complex network that allows performing distributed information processing, decision making, modeling and data fitting, paving the way for the self-awareness or self-adaptation. Additionally, it will constitute a clean energy self-powered device due to the novel use of sap, not only for transforming plants into living sensors, but also for clean energy generation. Croatian project partner is University of Zagreb, Faculty of electrical engineering and computing.

Other partners are: Instituto Tecnologico de la Energia, Spain; KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden, CYBRES GmbH, Germany, CIM-mes Projekt sp. z o.o. Poland; The Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) and UzL Lübeck, Germany. The project budget is 3,744,192.50 EUR.