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Sareen, Harpreet, Jiefu Zheng, and Pattie Maes. "Cyborg botany: augmented plants as sensors, displays and actuators." Extended Abstracts of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. 2019.

Argus is a living plant that continuously monitors water for heavy metal impurities, with nanosensors inside its leaves. These sensors, of the order 1-2nm, are injected inside the leaves and stay within the intercellular space.  

These impurities come in contact with these nanosensors and turn off (or quench) their fluorescence of indicating the presence of toxicity in the environment. Such method of detecting heavy metal toxicity is real-time, showing a visible output within 15mins to 2 hours, in contrast to current lab methods where sample are shipped and total testing takes two weeks or longer. A prototype of Argus will be displayed with benign chemicals injected inside plants showing visual output from within Argus’s leaves. A laser mounted on the optical bench is mounted with 2-axis rotation to be asdasdasdasd to move the pointer to the region with nanomaterials inside them.

These impurities come in contact with these nanosensors and turn off (or quench) their fluorescence of indicating the presence of toxicity in the environment. Such method of detecting heavy metal toxicity is real-time, showing a visible output within 15mins to 2 hours, in contrast to current lab methods where sample are shipped and total testing takes two weeks or longer. A prototype of Argus will be displayed with benign chemicals injected inside plants showing visual output from within Argus’s leaves. A laser mounted on the optical bench is mounted with 2-axis rotation to be able to move the pointer to the region with nanomaterials inside them.