Summary
Milk is a great blessing of nature. It is a complete food for all, from the few months baby to the elder person. It provides all the important nutrients required by a body for its development and growth such as protein, water, carbohydrates, minerals, fat and vitamins. It not only provides power but also enhances immunity to fight against many different types of pathogens. It is necessary for the growth of bones and for the blood clotting. It fulfills body’s calcium requirement. 100g of cow’s milk contains 3.9g fat, 87.8g water, 14mg cholesterol, 120mg calcium, 3.2g protein etc. A lot of edibles can be made from milk like cheese, yogurt, ice cream, butter and in many other confectioneries. Milk has no perishable form. Unfortunately, the human population is increasing in uncontrolled manner so it has become a great challenge to fulfill the human needs of milk. Pakistan is the fourth largest country for milk production of the world but still it doesn’t meet demands of the nation. According to a survey of Pakistan, almost 8.5 million livestock is raised by small and poor families in the rural areas and 35-40 million of rural population is dependent on livestock. As Pakistan is developing country, a milk man has to face a lot of economic problems. We usually hear the word “Milk Adulteration” but aren’t fully aware of the true concept. Most of the milkmen are uneducated and have huge families to support. Other factors like maturity age of animal, shortage of fodder and disease prevalence are also a challenge for the milkmen. Thus they rely on different adulterants like water, starch, urea, flour and vegetable oil to increase the milk quality.
In order to fight this adulterant problem the scientists and researchers dealing with the agriculture and dairy industry have been working tirelessly. They have proposed a number of methods in order to analyze milk accurately for its parameters and came up with Milk analyzers using these techniques. These techniques can be categorized in three: Chemical methods, Ultrasonic Testing and Infrared Testing. Chemical methods are considered to be the ancestors in milk quality testing as it’s the first solution scientists came up with. These methods are still used for the calibration of the analyzers. Milk industry gradually shifted towards electrical means of analyzing and testing as chemical testing needs a lot of time and patience. They are costly as chemical once used can’t be reused. Moreover, risk factor is also larger as we have to deal with chemicals. Comparing between Ultrasonic and Infrared testing we see that both of them are easier and accurate than chemical. The difference that lies is that ultrasonic is a bit costly as compared to infrared technique. Infrared sensors are easily available and they cover a wider range of useful wavelengths than ultrasonic.We are also taking a baby step to introduce our dairy industry to a level that corresponds to international standards. We intend to use infrared technique for determining and analyzing milk quality parameters. We intend to reduce the price as importing milk analyzers and their maintenance costs huge sums of money to our local dairy industry. Moreover, in our culture there are quite a lot of chances of corruption and tempering the results by the middleman. In order to avoid it our proposed solution not only is a device but is a complete system that will ensure the security of the generated results. The results that will be generated at run time by the analyzer will not only be available on a smart phone but will also be transmitted to a centrally managed database. The decision of either accepting or rejecting the milk sample will be made at the spot and the quantity purchased along with the amount paid will automatically get stored on the database and will be immediately available to the higher authorities.
Details
In a country like Pakistan having an agriculture based economy, the dairy industry plays a vital role. Despite this, there is no way of ensuring the provision and consumption of pure and healthy milk. MILKAN is a step taken to provide an electrical solution to this problem and to serve as a tool for the growth of dairy industry in Pakistan. MILKAN is a portable, low-cost and wireless Milk Analyzer that will analyze a milk sample to determine its composition by measuring parameters like fat and protein content. To measure these parameters MILKAN will employ Infra-Red Spectroscopy techniques. MILKAN is not just an IOT device but a complete system with an android interface and a database to keep the records of all the testing performed. The database will be safe and unalterable at any level so the system can be employed at milk collection units by dairy companies to ease the payment process. This maintained data base and run time availability of the results to all of the concerned persons will avoid any corruption and alteration in the results by the middleman (managers and assistants). This very feature makes MILKAN different than and prominent in all other milk analyzers available in the market.
Interests
Hardware/IOT, Biotech, Health/Pharmaceutical, Agriculture, Technology
01/Founders
