Poster Abstract: HERMES - Heavy Element Real-time Monitoring for Environmental Safety
Published in Proceedings of the 23rd ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems, 2025
Heavy metal contamination in soil presents substantial risks to public health, industry, and the larger biosphere. Current methodologies for detecting heavy elements rely on labor-intensive sampling methods and time-consuming laboratory analysis, limiting temporal and spatial resolution. We present HERMES, an in-development heavy metal monitoring system that can be placed around high risk areas. HERMES leverages soil microbial fuel cells as autonomous biosensors. These biosensors when deployed as a sensor field, can monitor soil conditions and transmit data using a distributed machine learning framework. By providing improvements in the speed and resolution of heavy metal contamination detection, HERMES aims to enable earlier intervention and mitigate long-term damages.
Stephen Taylor and Pat Pannuto