- Home
- Companies
- molluSCAN-eye
- Products
- molluSCAN-eye - Biomonitoring And ...
molluSCAN-eye - Biomonitoring And Environmental Protection Technology
The molluSCAN-eye® solution is based on the ability of the bivalve molluscs to provide information about the water quality.
A much more accurate solution
Non-invasive High Frequency Valvometry (HFNI) is a unique technology today. It is 10 to 100 times more sensitive than in situ physicochemical sensors.
A much more economical solution
Compared to a comparable service based essentially on chemical analysis.
A logical & educational tool to help succeed in your communication
The public and decision makers have difficulties understanding a list of chemicals and theirs implications. Everyone understands if the animals are healthy!
An in-situ and continuous monitoring solution
24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year, data is received and analyzed from anywhere in the world. It is therefore possible to intervene at the first sign of a problem.
An animal-friendly, maintenance-free & eco-responsible solution
No field maintenance is required for several years because the animals live in their natural habitats and clean themselves. No fouling problems like on other sensors.
Our molluSCAN-eye® technology is based on the ability of bivalve mollusks to inform us about the quality of the water as soon as it disturbs them.
Behavioral analysis is the most sensitive tool available on the market. Applied in-situ, it is 10 to 100 times more sensitive than the chemical analysis of natural waters, without preconceived ideas about the nature of the pollutant, its degradation products or the unknown cocktail of molecules produced.
Thanks to tiny electromagnets glued to the valves, and the unique electronics and computing (embedded Linux), our systems monitor the opening and closing cycles of the valves, their growth, the spawn, etc. This technology, the High Frequency Non-Invasive Valvometry (HFNI), allows us to follow more than 10 different physiological and behavioral parameters daily and to realize daily health assessments.
This can be done 24/7 and remotely from any computer thanks to the Internet of Things: i.e. the exchange of information and data from the physical world (in this case animals and an on-board system) to the Internet.
A micro-electromagnet is glued onto each animal’s valve. The measurement of the valve gap, completely original (10 to 100 times more precise than the classical techniques), is performed between 2 coils of less than 1 gram. It is insensitive to variations of water turbidity and salinity as well as to fouling. It has been proven to be maintenance-free for over 3.5 years at sea.
The management of the measurements and the signal is carried out under embedded Linux, on 2 cards. Card 1 is immersed in a waterproof case, as close as possible to the animals.
Card 1 is connected to Card 2 on the surface via an umbilical cable (250 m max.). It manages the connectivity with the server at the Arcachon Marine Station. The combination of Card 1 – umbilical – Card 2 set is a real micro-computer, whose design we own. It runs under embedded Linux. The coded data is transmitted daily via the cell phone network or directly via an Ethernet socket.
The files are decoded, processed and saved automatically upon arrival, on a workstation at the Arcachon Marine Station. Two backup sites, located in two different places from the main server, ensure security by redundancy. For each animal, the data recording is a sequence of points that each have two values:
- The distance between the two electrodes (i.e. the value of the valve distance at the height of the electrodes, expressed in micrometers).
- The time (expressed in hour, min, sec) which is the time at which the measurement is taken.
The daily updated results are available with a login and password. Our team monitors them and is always available to analyze and discuss them. The goal is to make this information available on the internet, in an automatic manner, every morning:
- by modeling the behavior and around ten physiological parameters on easy-to-read graphs
- in the form of green, orange or red summary indexes, we publish integrative information about the group of animals’ monitored health status and as a result, their environment as well
- we then move from monitoring sentinel animals, witnesses of the local biodiversity, to monitoring the quality of the environment, seen not by partial chemical analyses but by an integrative biomonitoring.