Sensiplus: an innovative solution for health and safety applications

Nowadays, health and safety are some of the most central topics all over the world in order to improve people life quality and well–being. In this field, an innovative integrated system based on a two layer architecture is presented: the Hardware Layer is the SENSIPLUS chip, a smart sensor IoT ready node endowed with on board sensors and implementing the Electrical Impedance Spectroscopy; the Software Layer deals with measurement acquisition and analysis. The sensing and measuring capabilities of the chip are an enormous potential for the whole platform, with the possibility to be adopted in many different applications. In particular, the SENSIPLUS chip has been involved in three specific applications, all addressed to the warranty of people health and safety: a) Contaminants detection and recognition in air; b) Contaminants detection and recognition in water. The SENSIPLUS chip, developed by the Italian company Sensichips s.r.l. [1] in collaboration with the research group headed by the professor Paolo Bruschi of the University of Pisa, is marked by a very low power consumption (1.5 mW), includes a complete universal sensor interface into a tiny silicon CMOS integrated circuit of only 3mm x 3mm in size. It is endowed with a versatile analog front end, electrical impedance spectroscopy measuring technique and different serial digital interfaces (as SPI and I2C). Furthermore, it is endowed with on-chip sensors as temperature, humidity and gas sensors.