Team:EPFL/Human Practices
Espress'EAU - Integrated Human Practices
Stakeholders
Human practices lie at the core of our project. We wanted our product to not only be user-friendly but adapted to the user needs. To do so, we contacted several actors of the water supply chain, from researchers to sample collectors.
Service de l’eau ville de Lausanne
The water service of Lausanne ensures the catchment, treatment, storage, pumping, distribution, evacuation, purification, protection, and analysis of water for the Lausanne region (~380 000 inhabitants) throughout the year 1. Fereidoun Khajehnouri, Head of the water control division from the water service provided us with valuable information about the pesticide problem in Switzerland and some guidelines to start our project.
Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology
EAWAG is a world-wide leading institute for research, education, and expert consulting in aquatic science and technology 2. Prof. Urs Von Gunten, from the department of water resources and drinking water provided us a feedback on our project plan and helped us identify the main target of our device by informing us on the various inequalities in water testing encountered by villages.
Association des fontainiers de Suisse Romande (AFSR)
The goal of AFSR is to promote and represent the fontainier job to the authorities and the population. The fontainier is responsible for the safety of the drinking water infrastructures of the water distribution network 3. They explained to us how their work is affected by pesticides and provided us with some feedback on how they would envision using Espress’EAU.
Timeline
23rd of April
After the brainstorming stage of the project, we had in mind that we wanted to work on the detection of pesticides in water. However, we were not fixed on how to proceed. We considered the option to either monitor the water in a continuous or in a fractioned manner using a bioreactor. We decided to contact Fereidoun Khajehnouri, Head of the water control division from the Lausanne water service to have his opinion on the subject.
He explained to us that the continuous monitoring of water sources was a tough task that many engineering teams had tried to solve and that it required more time than the time window settled by the iGEM competition. He rather suggested us to focus on a low-cost and easy to use way to detect toxic material or study their impact on different types of organisms.
He also informed us on the water analysis procedure realised in his laboratory: the water samples are sent to the laboratory for qualitative or quantitative detection of toxic waste in waters.
After this call, we decided that it would be better to provide our bioreactor with some sampling water in a fractioned manner (eg. Every week/month) and maintain the organism alive in the meantime.
2nd of June
To get some insight on our bioengineering and implementation strategies, we contacted Prof. Urs Von Gunten from the department of water resources and drinking water at EAWAG.
He provided us with some warnings about sensitivity. Indeed, the authorised pesticides concentration thresholds in drinking water are very low (0.1-2mg/L maximum) and that we may have to pre-concentrate our water to get a response from the cell-based system. He also told us that we should not expect to detect dramatic changes over a short period of time, and he raised a point about the blank. Finally, he informed us on the testing frequency inequalities depending on the living area size and localisation.
After this call, we could better identify who would benefit from our device. However, taking care of a bioreactor would imply providing a specific training to the user and went against the idea of creating something user-friendly and easily deployable. We thus decided to give up on our initial idea of a chemostat and re-designed the system to be handled by non-trained users. We also made sure to integrate the cost factor as a priority, to make sure that our system would allow us to increase the testing frequency without hurting the villages’ budgets.
1st of July
At that time, we were not able to access the laboratory yet but were eager to start building and testing our ideas! We thus decided to try to find a place where we could conduct preliminary experiments and develop our hardware components. That is when we found the Hackuarium. The Hackuarium is a not-for-profit association aiming to democratise science through public engagement. Hackuarium members want to investigate new ways of carrying out interdisciplinary research and innovation, by making their results open, accessible (low-cost), simple and easily reproducible (low-tech) and by promoting an open source philosophy 4.
We were able to access the hacked lab of Hackuarium to conduct preliminary experiments and to get some feedback about our project. We also had the chance to get some special advice on the hardware device by one of the members of the Hackuarium, Luc Patiny. He is a lecturer from the Chemistry department at EPFL who built an open-source spectrophotometer at the Hackuarium with his daughter, Oceane Patiny 5.
14th of July
Whilst on the bus, one of us noticed a newspaper article about how the Chlorothalonil affected some villages nearby Lausanne. In this article, a fontainier was interviewed about how the pesticide had impacted the water network he was in charge of and how him and his colleagues had to rethink its structure to overcome the problem of contaminated water sources 6. Curious about what exactly the job of fontainier is and how pesticides impacted it, we decided to contact the Romandie association of the fontainiers (AFSR) to learn about it and determine how our project could help them handle the water pollution problem.
We received a warm welcome from Quentin Morezzi, president of the AFSR, and his colleagues and identified several points on which our project could help them. As hypothesized by Prof. Urs Von Gunten, fontainiers responsible for the water supply of small villages would be able to test more often their water without drastically increasing their testing budget. This would allow them to have a better knowledge of their water network. Moreover, having a small user-friendly on-site device that could be handled by non-trained people would permit the fontainiers to gain some independence on the testing from the laboratories, thus saving time for both by circumventing traditional water analysis procedures and avoiding to transport the water samples to the laboratories unless a detailed analysis is required.
23rd of July
In the meantime, we elaborated a survey where we asked people’s opinion on their tap water quality and how they would envision our testing device to be like. We launched the survey on the 23rd of July and were able to collect results.
14th of August
To have a better insight on how water quality testing is coordinated at the cantonal level we contacted J. Ducry, head of the water quality division from the Office de la consommation (OFCO) and cantonal water inspector 7. We presented him the project and he provided us with positive feedback regarding the targeted users and the cost. However, he raised some concerns about the sensitivity of our system regarding the low thresholds imposed by the Confederation.
23rd of September
We decided to make an interview with Quentin Morezzi about his job and the water pollution problems his colleagues and him encounter. We also updated him on the project advancements made in the laboratory and asked for his feedback.
23rd of October
We invited Quentin Morezzi, president of the AFSR, to our lab where we gave him a live demonstration of our device. He then proceeded to give us some useful feedback about the device. His main points:
The prototype meets the needs of the Fontainier association in terms of size, price and simplicity of usage, and could be used for preliminary water quality analyses.
The minimalist design is suitable for use in an office environment without taking up a lot of space. One idea for closing the different parts of the system would be to use insulating foam to fuse the cover with the system support.
The capsule system containing the genetically modified yeasts that would be supplied with the prototype ensures the ease of use of the system, with the user only having to introduce the water sample to be tested into the capsule, thus avoiding any contact with the genetically modified organisms. A second box for the glass capsules used would be even more convenient.
The Fontainier operators who would use the device are equipped with the necessary equipment (syringes, gloves, bleach) that would allow the EspressEAU system to be used safely.
The fact that tests can take multiple hours to run, means that even if the device is small and portable, a Fontainier cannot take it with him or her and do measurements outside of a lab or an office.
An automated processing of the data is necessary in order for the Fontainier to use the device.
Saving the data on an SD card, and by-passing the use of a computer while running the experiments would be a plus.
His feedback was overall very positive, with very little negative comments. We view this as a great success as we designed our device with the intention of it to be mainly used by the Fontainiers.
27th of October
We presented our project to Endre Horvath, CEO of Swoxid. This was an important encounter since Swoxid is also developing a product that is low-cost and deployable in villages with limited resources.
A word on Swoxid: Swoxid is a company making a low-tech water filter. The technology is based on an innovative nanoporous aerogel composite filter which - upon solar irradiation - is able to render contaminated water safe by removing and inactivating infectious disease-causing biological agents such as bacteria, viruses, protozoa and worms. Unlike the conventional water purification technologies this system does not require the use of electricity or chemical compounds to provide disinfection.
Endre provided us with useful feedback and insights regarding our product with a focus on the challenges that we might face when it comes to putting it on the market:
The problematic of rapid local generic testing of water quality is a global issue with very little solutions (especially for microbes). The Espress’EAU is thus an interesting system that could have many usages.
As we are aiming to distribute the device that contains GMOs across Switzerland (and potentially internationally), we must be wary of the safety regulations regarding such organisms.
Our device must pass a safety certification, were it to be commercialized, especially since it closely integrates water and electrical components. But the casing of our device does protect against any explosions or sparks.
We could use a UV light to kill the yeast cells after the measurements have been recorded.
He complimented the design and the choice of 3D printing components as it helps sharing the project around the world. From his experience with his start-up, 3D printing components is the best way to prototype and experiment with.
This was another positive and constructive encounter with a professional from the field. We will stay in contact to set-up an experiment using our system to test the efficiency of his filter. However, his filter kills bacterias, viruses (and not micropollutants), and our system is not adapted to measure the presence of living organisms in water because they would falsify the yeast OD600 measurements. Nevertheless, Endre experiments with coliform bacteria and uses OD measurements to measure their presence/growth in water and he would be interested in testing our device.
References
- Service de l’eau [Internet]. Official website of the city of Lausanne. 2018 [cited 2020 Oct 18]. Available from: https://www.lausanne.ch/officiel/administration/securite-et-economie/eau.html
- Portrait - Eawag [Internet]. [cited 2020 Oct 26]. Available from: https://www.eawag.ch/en/aboutus/portrait/
- Hackuarium/simple-spectro [Internet]. Hackuarium; 2020 [cited 2020 Oct 26]. Available from: https://github.com/Hackuarium/simple-spectro
- Hackuarium [Internet]. [cited 2020 Oct 26]. Available from: http://wiki.hackuarium.ch/w/Main_Page
- Collaborateurs responsables des differents domaines de l’eau | VD.CH [Internet]. [cited 2020 Oct 26]. Available from: https://www.vd.ch/toutes-les-autorites/departements/departement-de-lenvironnement-et-de-la-securite-des/direction-generale-de-lenvironnement-dge/responsables-par-domaine/responsables-eau/
- Chlorothalonil: les communes se sentent abandonnées [Internet]. Chlorothalonil: les communes se sentent abandonnées. [cited 2020 Oct 26]. Available from: https://journaldemorges.ch/actualites/chlorothalonil-les-communes-se-sentent-abandonnees
- Association des fontainiers de Suisse Romande [Internet]. [cited 2020 Oct 26]. Available from: https://fontainiers.ch/
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