When Sophia the social humanoid robot appeared on The Tonight Show, the world was stunned as she played Rock, Paper, Scissor, threw in a joke about world domination and held a conversation comfortably with Jimmy Fallon. Reactions ranged from pure horror at how far technology had come, to wonder at the same. It’s no secret that even major scientists of our time have frowned upon this AI advancement including Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk; but individuals like Mark Zuckerberg disagree and celebrate this advancement. As of now, only time will tell if their fears are justified but until then, we can celebrate the many other achievements in this field—especially those closer to home. Bandra boy Keenan Pinto, a bioengineer currently based in Denmark invented an app that allows plants to talk to humans!
Keenan is currently the co-founder and head of technology at Nordetect, a hardware company that has developed a solution that helps farmers accurately check their soil’s nutritional content in an affordable and traceable way. Prior to founding Nordetect, Keenan was part of a residency program at SPACE10, a design and innovation lab in the heart of Copenhagen. “My residency was related to a lab that explored new ways of producing and distributing food in urban environments. More specifically, how cities could feed themselves in the future using Hydroponics and vertical farming,” says the scientist, when asked how he first began to devise this app. The residency’s team played a major role post-production, to help make Keenan’s app more user-friendly, “I had developed an integrated sensor system that allowed humans to ‘feel’ what the roots are feeling in a water based growing environment and ‘feed itself’ with liquid fertilizer. However, the data visualization was through complex graphs that were not the easiest to decipher. With the team’s help, we decided upon a chatbot. This evolved from a text-based application to a voice enabled application. That’s how Sprout was born.”
Armed with a technical education in Biotech Engineering from Manipal University and a Masters in Plant Genetics from the University of Nottingham, Keenan’s work lays rooted in the domain of plant biology, biochemical analysis and electronic systems. Sprout is an amalgamation of the aforementioned fields—its hardware consists of sensors that monitor pH, conductivity, light and humidity and temperature. It also has dosing pumps that respond to sensor readings, thereby adding in nutrients in a controlled fashion. “These are the most relevant parameters to growing in a hydroponics setup. Monitoring these parameters help users maintain a consistent and reproducible growth. This data is then transmitted to the cloud using Wi-Fi and visualised as graphs for remote monitoring,” explains Keenan.
However, we still remained curious about how the Chatbot would play its role in this, a question Keenan patiently answered, “The Voice layer was built using Google algorithms that interpret a user’s question and find a relevant answer. After brainstorming with Stefannia Russo about the potential, it was decided that Sprout would be a tool to educate users about hydroponics. Using a mind map to understand, ‘How much does it know?’ and ‘What topics does it know?’, I constructed the brain of Sprout. Relevant questions were then put into Google’s algorithm and the nature of the answers determined Sprout’s personality.”
Even this was further broken down by Bas Van De Poel, who converted the technical answers Keenan drafted, into a more playful, easy voice. With this final step completed, Sprout could now communicate via text and voice. Tying the hardware and voice later together was the next step; which fell upon Nina Cecilie Højholdt who helped set up a server that could process requests from the voice inputs and send them to the hardware and vice versa. In short, this allowed a user to ask Sprout how things were going or Sprout could even ask a user to dim the lights!
The Sprout project at SPACE10 was a part of multiple experiments and prototypes exploring how Natural Interfaces could help enable a better everyday life in many different use cases. As of now, it is no longer being developed. Since the completion of Sprout, he is working with Nordetect to optimize agricultural resources and help with improving soil quality and conservation; especially for Indian farmers (a solution he says is also affordable). Currently, the team is part of HAX, a global hardware accelerator that’s helping them get the soil test to market faster. At the rate Keenan is going, there’s no doubt this Bandra boy is going to achieve even bigger things, a feat we wish him all the luck with!
All the images used in this article have been reused with permission from SPACE10.
For more information on what Keenan is working towards for a more sustainable way of life, visit his website. If Sprout is what caught your eye, click here to stay updated.
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