Dehydromatic

Dehydromatic is the name of an App to guide smallholder farmers

Dehydromatic is the name of an App to guide smallholder farmers in the solar drying of their fruits and vegetables. It also informs value-chain players (primarly Processors, but also Transporters, Consumers, Growers, etc.) of relevant data related to solar drying. Trough this, the App enables players to tap into horticulture intelligence, which leads to better practices and informed decisions. The App also observes the micro-climate and learns from the operations log how the control variables (as reported by the operator and sensors) made a batch to turn out to be good good, medium, or bad. There may be a qualitative indicator of fruit quality (e.g. using five star-rating) to reflect the success of the drying process. Based on this, the App is able to ‘learn’ from the operator what are best practices.

The final, mature version of the App facilitate the following:

Communication between food processors and farmers to exchange agricultural sourcing information (prices, quality, etfc.)

Learning materials (processing knowledge, experience, best practices)

Site evaluation (solar capacity through so-called solar irradiance-intensity maps)

Real-time monitoring and advice (combustion heating requirememts and predicting fruit quality, by linking past micro-climate and outside weather conditions -> past quality using a neural network)

The ultimate goal is to reduce risks and increases profits for businesses active in the food drying processing, lower market prices for consumers, fairer prices for

growers, less post-harvest losses and better management information to drive interventions by public and private agencies. Dehydromatic is developed by Ujuizi Laboratories, a spin-off company of the Faculty of Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation (ITC), University of Twente, in collaboration with several other ICT experts.

For the webpage, we have reserved the following domain (expires 2 May 2018): http://www.dehydromatic.com