Compliant plant wearables for localized microclimate and plant growth monitoring

Joanna M Nassar,Diego Rosas Villalva,Muhammad M Hussain,Maha M Nour,Sherjeel M Khan,Amani S Almuslem

doi:10.1038/s41528-018-0039-8

Abstract

The microclimate surrounding a plant has major effect on its health and photosynthesis process, where certain plants struggle in suboptimal environmental conditions and unbalanced levels of humidity and temperature. The ability to remotely track and correlate the effect of local environmental conditions on the healthy growth of plants can have great impact for increasing survival rate of plants and augmenting agriculture output. This necessitates the widespread distribution of lightweight sensory devices on the surface of each plant. Using flexible and biocompatible materials coupled with a smart compact design for a low power and lightweight system, we develop widely deployed, autonomous, and compliant wearables for plants. The demonstrated wearables integrate temperature, humidity and strain sensors, and can be intimately deployed on the soft surface of any plant to remotely and continuously evaluate optimal growth settings. This is enabled through simultaneous detection of environmental conditions while quantitatively tracking the growth rate (viz. elongation). Finally, we establish a nature-inspired origami-assembled 3D-printed “PlantCopter”, used as a launching platform for our plant wearable to enable widespread microclimate monitoring in large fields.

Highlights

With increased global population, we are constantly challenged to meet the demand of food and to maintain a clean environment
3d shows that our sensor can withstand up to ~35% strain, while it displays a linear relationship up to 22% strain, which will be the preferable regime of operation
To understand how the surrounding environment and optimization actions are directly affecting the health of plants, there is an increasing need for portable and remote techniques to provide continuous and quantitative measurement of plant growth rate

Summary

Introduction

We are constantly challenged to meet the demand of food and to maintain a clean environment. In a greenhouse or a crop field, centralized climate monitoring devices are used to monitor the surrounding climate conditions,[6,7] and remotely acquired data are used to either alter the environmental conditions if necessary, or solely used as a monitoring tool. Those sensors fail to see the conditions experienced by each plant as the environmental conditions can change from one end of a greenhouse (or field) to another, leading to yield reduction because of varying conditions across the field. They are costly, uncontrolled for localized microclimate evaluation, and possess limited potential for use in large fields or greenhouses, where augmented local control is vital on a large scale

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Conclusion