Design and implementation of food quality system using a Serverless Architecture: case study of gluten intolerance

Abstract

Nowadays, approximately 3% of the general population suffers from food allergies and
intolerances which could be produced by more than 160 foods. The European Food Safety
Authority (EFSA) stated that cereals are among the top 8 most frequent food allergens in
different countries. Moreover, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates
that each year 48 million people get sick from a foodborne illness, 128,000 are hospitalized,
and 3,000 die. To address these issues, the inclusion of technological platforms and the use of
sensors are vastly increasing in the food industry analysis. In this research, serverless
architectures are employed because of their benefits, including deploying applications in a
simple way without the necessity of using a dedicated server, reducing operating costs, having
no scaling restrictions, and allowing the division of operating blocks. The popularity of this
model has found many practical applications such as electricity, health, telemedicine, and
industry. In this research, the design and development of a serverless-sensor tool for food
analysis is presented. Preliminary tests of gluten and no gluten-containing samples are shown,
using the Hamamatsu C12880MA sensor working in wavelength range of 340-850nm. The
results showed great potential for easy data collection, analysis, and scalability of thousands of
sensors and actuators in the future, which has powerful benefits applied in the food industry.