ELFO project

Electronic Food

The foundations of a new enabling technology for edible electronic systems.

Project

Electronic Food (ELFO) seems a concept from the future, food for humanoids or robots; but it’s not. The increasing of wasted and counterfeit food, pathology related to poor nutrition, requires the development of new green technology to track the food supply chain and monitor the wellness of our gastrointestinal tract. ELFO will provide the foundations of new enabling technology for edible electronic systems. The platform will find application in electronic tags for food monitoring, serving public health, and providing at the same time a very powerful tool against counterfeiting and wasting. At the same time, the implementation of a smart edible pill will supply gastrointestinal disease prevention, diagnosis, and therapy. A home healthcare device with the goal to anticipate needs and ensure compliance. Besides, one of the challenges of ELFO is to encourage the public acceptance of such food technology, which is useful for human health and for the environment.

Sensors

Sensors for in-body operation
Sensors for out-of-body operation

Power Supplies

Batteries
Super capacitors
Fuel Cells
Energy Harvesting Technologies

Communication strategies

Radio Frequericy Communication
Intra Body Communication
Acoustic and Ultrasounds Communication
Optical strategies

Systems Approbation

In vitro tests

Materials approval

In vitro tests

Materials

Insulators
Conductors
Semiconductors

Micro- and opto- electronic components

Field-effect transistors
Electrolyte-Gated transistors
Edible electronic circuits
Light-emission and chromism

Project

Biomedical / Pharmaceutical application

Edible Electronics

Food Industry application

Concept

From Ingestible to Edible Electronics

Edible electronics can be considered an evolution of the most traditional concept of ingestible electronics where the proposed devices, besides being suitable for swallowing, are fully digestible within the body, and safely releasable into the environment without need of recollection. Going past the traditional model of electronic devices, ELFO envisions a technology which is not only environmentally friendly, cost-effective, energy-efficient, but also safe for ingestion, and degradable within the body after performing its function by either being digested or even metabolized.

Enlarge

Concept

Team

Contact

ELFO Project Coordinator

Mario Caironi

Studied at “Politecnico di Milano” (Milan, Italy) where he obtained his Laurea degree in Electrical Engineering in 2003 and a Ph.D. in Information Technology with honours in 2007. In March 2007 he joined the group of Prof. Henning Sirringhaus at the Cavendish Laboratory (Cambridge, UK) as a post-doctoral research associate. In April 2010 he has been appointed as a Team Leader at the Center for Nano Science and Technology@PoliMi of the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (Milan, Italy), in 2014 entered the tenure track at the same institution and obtained a tenured researcher position in 2019. Co-author of more than 120 scientific papers in international journals and books. He is a 2014 starting ERC grantee and a 2019 consolidator grantee.

Researcher

Alessandro Luzio

Received Master degree cum laude (2007) and PhD (2010) in Chemical Engineering and Material Science at Palermo University. As a PhD student, he was involved in Plast_ICs project (main partner STMicroelectronics of Catania), aimed at the realization of Integrated Circuits on plastic substrates, and mainly developed in the laboratories of Consorzio Catania Ricerche. He was also involved in a 7 months period of collaborative research in the Chemistry Department of the Northwestern University, tutored by Professor T. J. Marks and Professor A. Facchetti. He joined the Centre of Nanoscience and Technology of the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT) in 2011 as a junior PostDoc.

Postdoctoral Researcher

Noemi Contreras Pereda

Noemí Contreras Pereda was born in Barcelona in 1994. She received her B.Sc and M.Sc with honors in Nanoscience and Nanotechnology from the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB) in 2016 and 2017 respectively, obtaining the university's special award for the degree studies. During her studies, she performed her B.Sc thesis in the group of Prof Christian Schönenberger in the University of Basel (Switzerland) studying the electrical transport in suspended carbon nanotube transistors.

In 2017, she was awarded with "la Caixa" Foundation fellowship to pursue her doctoral studies. Thus in 2017, she joined the group of Prof. Daniel Ruiz-Molina at the Catalan Institute of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology (ICN2) to pursue her doctoral studies, earning the Ph.D degree in Material Science in 2021. During her Ph.D, she developed novel conductive organic and metal-organic materials for their application in the healthcare as multimodal on-skin electronic sensors. During her doctoral studies, she won an e-COST Short Term Scientific Mission grant and did a research stay at ETH Zürich (Switzerland) under the supervision of Prof. Josep Puigmartí-Luis to develop cutting edge syntheses with microfluidic devices.

In May 2022, she joined the group of Mario Caironi at IIT in the frame of the ELFO project researching in edible electronics to expand her carrier in the field of green electronics.

Postdoctoral Researcher

Alberto Davide Scaccabarozzi

I am a materials engineer by training; alongside, I have been working on device fabrication and physics during my Postdoc years. My research activities encompass the broad field of Organic Electronics, in particular the study of structure-processing-property relationships of solution processable organic semiconductors. I am an expert in the chemical formulation of polymers and small molecules, in the assessment of structural and electronic properties of these materials and their application in a wide range of devices, including Organic Field-Effect Transistors (OFETs), Organic Solar Cells (OSCs), Organic Diodes, Organic Photodetectors (OPDs) and Bioelectronics applications.

PhD student

Fabrizio Mario Ferrarese

Fabrizio Mario Ferrarese was born in Latina (Italy) in 1992. He received B.S. degree in Materials Science at University of Tor Vergata (Rome), followed by a M.S. degree in Materials Science at University of Padua in collaboration with ENEA (Agenzia nazionale per le nuove tecnologie, l'energia e lo sviluppo economico sostenibile) where he did a year of Internship for the thesis project. He is currently a PhD candidate at the Politecnico di Milano in collaboration with the Center for Nano Science and Technology, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, Milan, working on the ELFO project investigating the electrical and toxicological properties of edible electronic devices.