Zero Hunger

What is zero hunger?

It is one of the sustainable development goals set up by the United Nations Organization. It is
about creating a world free of hunger by 2030.The global issue of hunger and food insecurity
has shown an alarming increase since 2015, a trend exacerbated by a combination of factors
including the pandemic, conflict, climate change, and deepening inequalities.

The persistent surge in hunger and food insecurity, fueled by a complex interplay of factors,
demands immediate attention and coordinated global efforts to alleviate this critical
humanitarian challenge.

Extreme hunger and malnutrition remains a barrier to sustainable development and creates a
trap from which people cannot easily escape. Hunger and malnutrition mean less productive
individuals, who are more prone to disease and thus often unable to earn more and improve
their livelihoods.

What is nanotechnology?
Nanotechnology refers to the branch of science and engineering devoted to designing,
producing, and using structures, devices, and systems by manipulating atoms and molecules at
nanoscale, i.e. having one or more dimensions of the order of 100 nanometres (100 millionth of
a millimetre) or less.

How can nanotechnology help to achieve the goal of zero hunger?

Today there are 842 million hungry people, of whom 200 million are children. From the other
European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) declares that 88 million tons of food are thrown away
every year, or 173 Kg per person. Data that FAO reports worldwide, 45% of the food produced
is thrown away. How nanotechnology can help and contribute to the reduction of food waste,
valuable waste if reusable[1]. Nanotechnologies can support the whole process from farm to
fork, ensuring that less food is wasted and therefore better used, without compromising the
health of the consumer.

In this work several studies will be presented in which, Small Sensor System (S3), based on gas
sensors with nanomaterials has been used to identify possible contamination of foodstuff and
reduce food waste.

All the analyzed samples, were prepared in an identical manner for all the techniques used in
parallel so as to minimize possible differences. In general, in the food field, techniques that do
not go to destroy the sample are preferred, that are fast, and user-friendly, so as to be able to
combine as much as possible the real production and food processing.

The S3, consists of a pneumatic part, an electronic part and a chamber with a maximum 10
MOX gas sensors, and an online data acquisition and processing app. Flow, temperature,
humidity sensors, and actuators (valves and pumps) are all embedded inside the S3 device.
Techniques have been used in parallel to train the sensors, are chemical (GC-MS with SPME)
and microbiological (growth media), depending on the specific objective of the application and
the nature of the samples [2]. In the case of the reduction of possible microbiological
contaminations, the samples will be prepared with known concentrations of bacteria, yeasts or
molds, to reproduce real samples.

Once acquired and transmitted, data must be analyzed to extract relevant information.
Machine learning algorithms are widely used to achieve this purpose, ranging from
unsupervised methods (as PCA) to supervised learning