This Thursday, November 26th, at 15:00 (CET), the first workshop of the ASPIDI project (Automatic System Supported by the Population for the Identification of Diseases by Smelling Immunities) will take place. The aim of the first workshop is to present the research objectives, the experimental methods and the first activities in progress at the AQP Monopoli Waste Water Treatment Plant.

   The ASPIDI project was born to give a response to the need of the Puglia Water Authority (as the representative body of all the municipalities belonging to the Optimal Territorial Area) to have systems for monitoring and controlling in real time the odour emissions derived from treatment plants, aims to develop a prototype of a trained electronic nose capable of detecting unpleasant odours and sending the report in real time to a database that will update a web-gis platform that is easily accessible to citizens.

   The Regional Council of Lombardy, Italy, published a D.C.R. (Deliberazione Consiglio Regionale) on the 28th of July 2020, for the funding of the development of a platform to implement a control and monitoring system for odorous inputs. The decision of the Regional Environmental Administration of Lombardia was taken after studying the results of the first successful project of mapping odours developed by the Italian Regional Environmental Administration of Marche.

   The idea is to develop an app to register odour observations by citizens so that the environmental regulator can make informed decisions with real time data is not new. There are many applications in the market developed for this purpose, and we have seen how successful this tool is in projects not only in Italy but in many other countries such as the USA, Norway, Australia, Germany, or Spain, to say a few examples of a trend that it is growing rapidly around the world. What it is however new here, is that for the second time, an Environmental Administration has taken the decision of develop an app rather than acquiring it from a private company.