A “Plant-Wearable System” for Its Health Monitoring by Intra- and Interplant Communication

A step forward in smart agriculture is moving to direct monitoring plants and crops instead of their environment. Understanding plant status is crucial in improving food production and reducing the usage of water and chemicals in agriculture. Here, we propose a “plant-wearable,” low-cost, and low-power method to measure in-vivo green plant stem frequency as the indicator for plant watering stress status. Our method is based on measuring the frequency of a digital signal obtained with a relaxation oscillator where the plant is a part of the feedback loop. The frequency was correlated with the soil water potential, used as a critical indicator of plant water stress, and an 85% correlation was found. In this way, the measuring system matches all the requirements of smart agriculture and Internet of Things (IoT): ultra-low-cost, low-complexity, ultra-low-power, and small sizes, introducing the concept of wearability in plant monitoring. The proposed solution exploits the plant and the soil as a communication channel: the signal carrying the plant watering stress status information is transmitted to a receiving system connected to a different plant. The system's current consumption is lower than 50  μμ A during the transmission in the plant and 40 mA for wireless communication. During inactivity periods, the total current consumption is lower than 15 μμ A. Another important aspect is that the system has to be energy autonomous. Our proposal is based on energy harvesting solutions from multiple sources: solar cells and plant microbial fuel cells. This way, the system is batteryless, thanks to supercapacitors as a storage element. The system can be deployed in the fields and used to monitor plants directly in their environment.