Over the last year Vivent has had the pleasure of working collaboratively with an electrophysiologist who has been using PhytlSigns in tomato and eggplant greenhouses as part of the Swiss government's drive for Smart Farming and Digitisation in Agriculture. We recently found out more about his back story. Daniel Tran is a post-doc plant biologist [...]
Knowledge of the presence of plants’ sensing abilities powered by their signalling systems is limited except amongst specialist plant biologists. But recently COOP, the Swiss supermarket chain who are leaders in providing organic produce from apples to cotton t-shirts, introduced their COOP magazine readers to facts about how plants perceive their environments. The article “The [...]
For some time now PhytlSigns has been trialled by plant researchers in Rex Cocroft’s laboratory at the University of Missouri-Columbia, as part of their research into plant perception of herbivore vibrations and resultant plant signalling. This summer PhytlSigns was thoroughly tested by a visiting student under the NSF REU (National Science Foundation Research Experiences for [...]
Over the summer we have seen first hand how PhytlSigns technology can inspire young student scientists to want to know more about plant biology by giving them tantalising access to the hidden and relatively unexplored world of plant communication via electrical signals. Student Gus Saalfeld has based his final year school project around electrical signals [...]
Congratulations to Dr Hamdan Awan on the acceptance of our paper at the IEEE Global Communications Conference As part of series of profiles of scientists working with Vivent we are delighted to introduce Dr Hamdan Awan and to congratulate him on having our work accepted at the highly prestigious IEEE conference – Globecom coming up [...]
Anthony Schluchin, Electrical Engineer, HEIA, Fribourg, Switzerland Born in Switzerland , Anthony studied for an apprenticeship at EMF Fribourg before undertaking a BSc in Electrical Engineering at HEIA Fribourg. He's currently studying for an MSc in Embedded Systems at HES-SO Lausanne at the same time as working at the iPrint Institute. One of his major projects at HEIA has involved [...]
In the last few months of 2017 there were several reasons for the Vivent team to celebrate. Firstly, we heard that we had been granted funds by US government organisation DARPA to pursue fundamental research as part of their RadioBio project. This was followed by news that the EU’s Horizon 2020 fund for SMEs had [...]
First scientific seminar sharing Phytl Signs experimental results at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland Oct 27th saw the first sharing of experimental data from our plant electrical signal capturing device, Phytl Signs, with an expert scientific audience. Results from both Vivent’s own experiments, along with those from Professor Ricardo Ferraz de Oliveira of University of Sao [...]
After visiting a soil free greenhouse growing tomatoes Lynn Raven reflected on the benefits of raising crops in a soil free environment. Here’s what she had to say…. We are so accustomed to the soil-free growing of food crops now that we are in danger of becoming blasé about it’s arrival on the scene as [...]
As part of my support for the development of new innovative products for Vivent, I attended GreenTech 2016 in Amsterdam. We’re about to launch our Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign for Phytl Signs Explorer: a plant monitor that’s unlike any other – because it specifically listens to what the plant itself is communicating rather than simply measuring [...]
