Woodblock Printed Sensors for Low-cost Environmental Use Virtual Workshop

The ability to understand and measure key environmental parameters is important, but often relies on expensive, laboratory infrastructure making it inaccessible and therefore overlooked. In this project, we have been exploring whether woodblock printing can be used to create electrochemical sensors that can be used in real time at the point of need.
As an exemplar application area, this workshop will focus upon how printed sensors could be used at scale to help smallholder farmers in Africa enhance their knowledge of soil fertility. In addition to the technical aspect of making a woodblock printed sensor, it is essential that it can work in its intended context. In this workshop, we want to understand how this can happen from a multidisciplinary perspective. We hope the workshop will lead on to the creation of a model for how this novel sensing technology could be implemented in the future.

Scene-Setting Short Presentations
• Low-cost electrochemical sensors for point of need use Dr Andy Ward, University of Strathclyde
• Introduction to woodblock printing
Edwin Pickstone/Aoife McGarrigle, Glasgow School of Art
• On the ground and in the ground – insights into smallholder farming in Kenya Dr Ezekiel Njeru, Kenyatta University

Workshop Open Discussion

An open discussion will be held to explore the following questions:
• What key messages about soil fertility need to be communicated to farmers and how can this be done visually, and how does it align to what they already know?
• How would a microeconomy in sensor technology work?
• What resources are readily available in the area surrounding small holder farm networks
that could be used to produce sensors?
• What research gaps still exist and how can they be addressed?