Remote Monitoring of Fruit Postharvest Behaviour Based on Sensor Networks

The main objective of the production and distribution chain of fruit is to ensure that the product reaches the consumer in its optimal state of maturation. Prior to commercialization, the fruit stays in cool chambers for a short time. Nowadays, used methods by packinghouses are too expensive and they only provide samples of the atmosphere in some points of the chamber. Finally, these methods are too simple and unreliable. IVIA, through the research project "Sensogest", is developing an infrastructure capable of acquiring, pre-processing and transmitting information about the atmosphere of the cool rooms in a packinghouse to a remote station. This work reviews the infrastructure that IVIA is developing in order to acquire relevant information related to maturation of fruits (carbon dioxide and ethylene production rate) and storage conditions (temperature and relative humidity) in cool rooms. The first tests to design a new ethylene sensor, the performance of the developed CO 2 detector and the ability of a communication system based on the AS-Interface to monitor signals from temperature and relative humidity sensors will be shown.