Remote Farming: Monitoring Hydroponic Environments using IoTs

Hydroponics is an agricultural method to grow plants without soil. Instead, farmers use water to supply plants with the needed dissolved nutrition and minerals. This approach is hailed by society because it solves the problem of fertile land scarcity. In this work, we build a prototype, called Hystorms, which uses Internet of Things (IoTs) and a smartphone app to monitor hydroponic environments and alert farmers to abnormal conditions that need attention or adjustment. The IoT sensors transmit environmental data across the network to the farmer’s smartphone app via the Cloud. The Hystorms app delivers to farmers lots of information related to their hydroponics such as the GPS location of the current position of the farmer and a comprehensive profile about each hydroponic, such as its nutrition needs, schedule of fertilization, ambiance conditions (e.g., temperature, humidity, etc.), history of previously collected data, and notifications of unusual readings. Preliminary evaluation results for this prototype show a high acceptance level (80.5%) by farmers that can encourage more of them to adopt this new technology in agriculture.