An IoT Based Solar Powered, Smart Health Monitoring System for Soil and Growing Agro-Plants

Unavailability of inexpensive, reliable and smart health monitoring system for the soil and growing agricultural crop in developing countries like India is the major constraint for economic productivity and self-sufficiency in agro-products. To address such a burning issue, the present paper proposes an IoT based solar powered, inexpensive smart sensory system, for in situ and ex situ health monitoring of agricultural soil and growing crops. Here, the proposed system uses a single sensing mechanism to monitor the nitrate concentration in the roots of the crop as well as pH of soil. Additionally, the system has been integrated to measure all the ambient parameters detrimental to plant and soil health. The features including auto compensation of the measured parameters against temperature and humidity variations, auto calibration of the sensory systems adds smartness to the device. All the measurands were compared with the respective standard instruments and for all the measurements, readings were highly correlated with R2-value ranging from 0.98 to 0.99.The performance of the device was checked in the field and the results obtained were very satisfactory.