Ambrosus and Sensor Systems — What We Work on

At the early stages Ambrosus is focusing on creating APIs to integrate various sensors and IoT (Internet of Things) devices into its protocol, with the ultimate goal of turning sensors into oracles. We play around with different sensors and develop solutions to: 1) generate trustworthy data and 2) record it securely on the blockchain. For the moment we use solutions created by third parties, where the integrity of the sensor is assured by the temper-free body of the sensor. These sensors can provide an adequately high level of confidence in the data for the early stages of Ambrosus development. In the longer term, we aim to develop our own sensors that would couple the readings with the private signature that would assure that the sensor is neither hacked nor broken.

Dr Stefan Meyer (pictured), CTO of Ambrosus is leading R&D efforts into digitalisation of the supply chains. Stefan has built a network of over 300 entities during his time as Founding Managing Director at EPFL Food & Nutrition Center, which include most largest companies in Switzerland and many large companies in Europe from the food, nutrition and chemical sectors. Stefan is currently focusing on small mobile sensors that record various parameters about products during the distribution stages of the supply chains.

The sensors are in many cases the size of 5 credit cards stacked on top of each other and cost between 3 and 9Swiss Francs to produce (depending on quality of build and the variety of measurements possible). They can follow the packages alongside the supply chains and serve as a discreet and independent validator of quality for the products, as well as supplying the basic geolocational information for the products, which can be traced through existing tracking software solutions

We are working with a number of entities on pilot projects with traceability and quality assurance of food and pharmaceutical products. While we have been unable to share details about the pilot projects publicly, due to working under the NDA (Non-Disclosure Agreement) with nearly all the stakeholders, we are showcasing the basic tools for our pilot project on the hardware side to showcase to the community the work that we have been doing. We have recently been visited by the Swiss National TV who have featured the R&D activities of Ambrosus in Zug and Lausanne, for example showcasing the sensor calibration rig that Ambrosus intends to use to create a proper calibration of its own sensors, in order to guarantee the integrity and precision of data they would be generating. The TV emission will air on 16 October, and we will share it with our community once we have the final video. We will be releasing a detailed blog entry on IoT system within the next few days as well.