Objectives
h-ALO aims to develop a bio-chemical photonic sensor as a food screening tool for the early detection of contamination in food, enabling early warning and short-loop corrective actions and guaranteeing cost-effective food safety and food quality monitoring in the farm-to-fork local food chains.
h-ALO combines micro-nanotechnologies for optical sensing based on nanoplasmonics, advanced biorecognition, micro-engineered surfaces and microfluidics for the realization of an ICT monitoring analytical instrumentation that aims at impacting on food-chain security market by outperforming current commercially available portable tools for contamination detection in terms of cost, sensitivity, usability, and time to detection.
At the same time, h-ALO wants to develop a tool that is useful for end-users, thus contributing to the empowerment of new farming approaches and strengthen the competitiveness of local food production and retail chains.
Key innovations and strength points
Expected Impacts
h-ALO will impact on advancing the European digital transformation prompted by photonics in the Agriculture & Food sector by providing an affordable and portable monitoring system that allows farmers, food processors and retailers to monitor the safety and quality of food in real-time. h-ALO sensor will be versatile, fast and easy to use and, differently from competitive solutions such as dip-sticks, the sensitivity of h-ALO will be comparable to that of laboratory standard expensive and time-consuming tests.
Benefits for h-ALO sensor users
![quality](https://h-alo.eu/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/quality-400x267.png)
To better comply with quality and safety standards
![reduce-cost](https://h-alo.eu/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/reduce-cost-400x267.png)
To reduce use of resource and production costs
![](https://h-alo.eu/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/crescita-400x267.png)
To meet the consumers increasing demand for high quality and safe regional, organic and specialty products
![](https://h-alo.eu/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/data.png)
To create a database of analyses since all data registered through the h-ALO sensor can be stored in the cloud and made accessible any time
![](https://h-alo.eu/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/milk2-300x200.png)
To address new markets, strengthen local markets and farmers’ market