Project description
Online, fast and cheap monitoring of E. coli in water
Drinking water is essential for life, but if contaminated, it can pose substantial health threats. Take for instance, E. coli, one of the most common bacterial infections in humans and animals. Access to safe water is critical. The EU-funded ColiSense Online project is developing a fast, cheap and accurate cloud-based analyser that can quantify E. coli cells in drinking water. This solution, which takes only 60 minutes and costs just EUR 1 per analysis, can be applied anywhere – from waterworks to beverage distilleries – either at site or remotely. The goal is to eliminate E. coli-contaminated drinking water in the EU.
Objective
Drinking water is the most essential resource for life. Access to safe drinking water can prevent disease outbreaks, and lower diarrheal and other disease burdens. According to the World Health Organisation around 330,000 cases of water-related disease such as E. coli are reported yearly in Europe. Just in 2016, 6,378 confirmed cases of Shiga toxin‐producing Escherichia coli infections were reported in the EU. Symptoms include diarrhoea, vomiting, stomach pains, nausea, headache, and fever. With the current technologies it can take two or more days to identify infectious risks in drinking water and by then the affected water is likely to have been consumed.
ColiSense will bring to industrial production stage a quick (60 min), inexpensive (€1 per analysis) and accurate analyzer capable of detecting and quantifying E. coli cells in drinking water below the regulation threshold limits (1 cell per /100ml). ColiSense can be applied in a wide variety of industries, including the ones with the highest quality water demands in Europe (e.g. waterworks, food and beverage, pharma, cosmetic, etc.), and reach very high levels of efficiency. Our solution makes monitoring low-cost and easy to use with an enabled cloud dashboard (for remote monitoring) and analytic tools. The ultimate goal of ColiSense is to eliminate the large problem of E. coli contaminated drinking water distribution in EU (preventing people becoming sick by preventing them from drinking contaminated water).
bNovate Technologies AG (bNovate) is a company that offers solutions to waterworks and food and beverage industries for automated monitoring of microbiological parameters and fast detection of bacterial contaminations in water. The bNovate staff is composed of experts and professionals who have extensive knowledge in a wide variety of subjects related to water science, microbiology and flow cytometry.
Fields of science
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
SME-2 - SME instrument phase 2Coordinator
1024 Ecublens
Switzerland
The organization defined itself as SME (small and medium-sized enterprise) at the time the Grant Agreement was signed.