IoT Based Smart Plant Monitoring System

2023 13th International Conference on Cloud Computing, Data Science & Engineering (Confluence) | 978-1-6654-6263-1/23/$31.00 ©2023 IEEE | DOI: 10.1109/Confluence56041.2023.10048792

Dr. Vibha Nehra

Department of Computer Science and Engineering
Amity University Uttar Pradesh, India

Megha Sharma
Amity School of Engineering and Technology
Amity University Uttar Pradesh, India

Vaibhav Sharma
Amity School of Engineering and Technology
Amity University Uttar Pradesh, India

Abstract—Agriculture is a vast area that needs to be studied. is crucial for the efficient and optimum use of fresh water in
Technology development has brought us to the situation where irrigation.
there are sophisticated agricultural tools and systems. About The Internet of Things (IoT) is a technology that enables
80% of India’s surface water is used for agriculture. Applying
IoT becomes necessary to ensure proper use of water resources human-machine interaction and allows for the measurement of
and high-quality output. Because optimal irrigation in fields a machine’s capacity and capabilities by a variety of devices
can provide better crops, this paper presents an open-source [10]. It often consists of networks made up of sensors and
technology-based smart system to predict irrigation requirements equipment that are deployed in different geographic locations
of a field using sensing of ground parameters like soil moisture, according to the task chosen. It is a set of networks that are
environmental conditions like temperature and humidity, and
external parameters like obstacle detection or intruder alert used to collect data from sensors that are connected to web
using an infrared sensor. The proposed system is based on an servers so that users around the world can access the data.
algorithm that takes into account sensed data in addition to the A framework is created in IoT-based agriculture system to
previously mentioned parameters. The entire system has been monitor the field using sensors for light, temperature, soil
created and deployed on a pilot scale, and it wirelessly collects moisture, and other factors. The user can keep an eye on
sensor node data over the cloud using web services, while a both
web and mobile based information visualization and decision the situation on the field from anywhere. Contrasted with
support system offers real-time insights based on the analysis of the conservative approach, IoT-based smart farming is sig-
the sensor. The analysis displayed clear differences between the nificantly more productive. The technique can be used to
monitored and unmonitored environment and how it affects the increase profitability by utilising compost, pesticides, water,
plant health in both short and long term. The graphs help in and other resources. The constant ecological factors, such
visualizing the differences between the environment at fixed time
intervals. In the future, this system can be combined with other as soil moisture content and temperature, have an unceasing
technologies to predict rainfall, manage pH levels, and secure effect on harvest enhancement [11]. Monitoring the effective
the vast amounts of data created and saved over the cloud by use of water in agricultural areas is possible with the right
sensors. This would improve the system’s long-term viability and sensor placement.
make it more independent of human operation. Using intelligent irrigation devices, outdoor water savings
Index Terms—IoT, Monitoring, Blynk, DHT11, Soil Moisture,
are possible. Smart irrigation controllers and sensors have been
IR obstacle avoidance, temperature
developed in order to reduce outdoor water usage by irrigation
based on plant water requirements, as opposed to conventional
I NTRODUCTION automatic system timers, which irrigate according to a user-
determined set schedule [12]. This technology can be used
The economy of India is based primarily on agriculture. to construct a smart controller by attaching a sensor to an
About 65% of labour force is employed by it, and it accounts existing irrigation timer or as a whole system on its own. These
for more than 20% of the GDP [9]. India offers a vast variety products increase the effectiveness of irrigation by minimising
of agricultural products due to its unique agro-climatic zone. water waste while preserving plant health and quality. Utilizing
India, meanwhile, has a huge agricultural potential but has smart irrigation technology in the landscape may help to cut
been dealing with an agrarian problem for decades. Due to back on water usage outside. Both modest, private landscapes
an over-reliance on monsoon rains for irrigation and a lack of and huge, professionally managed landscapes can benefit from
modernization in farming practises, the state of agriculture in this technology.
India has not much improved as expected. The development The agriculture sector has been facing the issue of low and
of intelligent irrigation systems based on dynamic parameter inefficient water supply for a long time, so it is necessary
prediction using the Internet of Things and other technologies to bring a system for better management and utilization of

978-1-6654-6263-1/23/$31.00 2023
c IEEE 60

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the resources present for increased productivity. The research Induction Motor Protection System and Data Monitoring
started by reviewing the already done research in this particular Over IoT Blynk [2]. Use of automated or manual control
area. After that, the sensors for the system were decided. methods to start and stop an induction motor’s activity to
The reason for choosing the sensors was that some of the avoid system faults. Electromechanical actuators with built-in
major factors influencing the crop are moisture, humidity and sensors for remotely monitoring motor system characteristics
temperature. Another major factor which helps the crop from are the most widely used fault detection approach. Under some
rotting is a proximity sensor which detects intrusive objects conditions, the motor works as a form of defence. The motor’s
and informs the user about them. An architecture was created excursions also point to a cost-effective solution to induc-
for the system to work upon and it was linked to the Blynk tion motor difficulties. Blynk’s functionality was inculcated
server to get the information from the plant in real-time. through this research. How the data is taken from the sensors
and sent to the cloud in real time is shown in this research.
The organisation of this work is as follows: In Literature
The goal of the IoT-based monitoring system for epileptic
Review we see the related work done on the same and their
patients [3] is to monitor epileptic illness signs, Behavior
contribution followed by The Proposed System that works on
signals in humans and early disease prevention. The fuzzy
the flow of first checking for the surrounding temperature and
logic technique used to evaluate the required data set of
humidity, next it checks for the soil moisture. Now, if the value
ill patients’ parameters permits categorization into several
of the moisture level of soil is less and the weather conditions
forms of convulsions such as heart rate, body temperature,
are also dry, in that case the area can be watered and an alert
muscular spasms, and collapses. A prototype of an epileptic
for the same will be sent to the user via the blynk mobile
monitoring system had been effectively created and tested.
application. The article is also briefed with the hardware and
This project helped in understanding how the data received
technologies used to build the setup and their advantages.
from the sensors can be visualised and the results can be
Lastly we come to The Result Analysis and Conclusion of
analyzed.
the work carried out in this paper.
The second instance of Ipswich city-Australian council has
shown that utilising an intelligent soil-moisture surveillance
system [4] as a controller of irrigation leads to considerable
water conservation as well as cost reductions. In compared to
a rainfall-based allocation technique, the automatically gener-
ated web-based solution has proven to be more efficient. The
strategy used by the council not only improves performance
but also allows for less soil expertise and less labour required
to manage the irrigation system. Furthermore, the adoption
has decreased water use and waste, allowing for resource
conservation while producing higher-quality products overall.
This research is quite closely related to the one being worked
upon in this paper. The influence of the monitoring in deciding
the time and level of hydration of soil is really a helpful feature
in maintaining the plant health.
The overuse of fertilisers has a negative impact on soil
productivity. Farooq et al. [5] conducted a survey of 67
research papers papers published between 2006 and 2019
concerning the use of IoT in various agricultural applications;
they discovered that approximately 16% of the research papers
in study were on precision farming, 12% on surrounding tem-
perature, 13% on soil observing, 11% on humidity tracking,
Fig. 1. Work Flow of the Proposed System
5% on air and diseases monitoring, 11% on animal monitoring,
and 7% on water controlling. Furthermore, roughly 4% of the
study publications focused on fertilisation management. This
L ITERATURE R EVIEW research helped us in getting a broad look on the level of work
Disha et al. made a suggestion on how to effectively being done in the field of agriculture and plants in academic
manage, reduce, and increase water consumption efficiency area and how this paper can help in contributing to improve
[1]. Using the Blynk application, the individual will be allowed it.
to monitor field factors like temperature and moisture. The [6] describe the concept of a dynamic irrigation scheduling
solution that is suggested makes use of soil moisture sensors system (AgriSens) based on the Internet of Things (IoT) for
and DHT-11 sensors. This paper helped in understanding the optimal water administration of irrigated agriculture areas. Us-
utility of the sensors in a real world scenario and how we can ing IoT, the AgriSens delivers real-time, automated, adaptive,
inculcate the same in our research. and remote manual irrigation treatment for various phases of

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 growth of a crop’s product lifecycle. The AgriSens boosts Temperature Sensor:: The DHT11 temperature sensor is
field output by at best 10.21% over the old manual irrigation easily available in online stores and will keep a check on soil
approach, doubles the lifespan of the network, and achieves temperature. It will give timely readings and updates to the
94% dependability yet after 500 hours of service. The research user about soil temperature and whether it is affecting the
in this paper adds significant improvements to this research by moisture content of the soil.
adding in another factor that can help in improving the lifespan
of the plant and less dependability on resources.
Monitoring blood pressure while at home necessitates an
accurate, low-cost approach that is devoid of user mobility.
Ramakrishnan et al. [7] created a Portable Health Monitoring
Device utilising the Internet of Things (BLYNK APP), a
system that monitors and detects Human Heartbeat, SpO2
and delivers the output to the user or server end that use a
microcontroller at a low expense and high efficacy. The data
that is stored in the cloud-configured JAVA server will be
presented for subsequent examination by physicians. Similiar
to [2], this research helped in gaining insights on collecting Fig. 3. Temperature Sensor
data from Blynk to help in the analysis of the results.
The ESP8266 WiFiModule, that manages various activities Moisture Sensor:: A soil moisture testing sensor keeps a
and provides vital data on several parameters with respect to check on the moisture content of the soil and alerts the user
the plants under observation through wireless networking over to start or stop the irrigation. Moisture plays an important role
a digital system, was used by Badri et al. to build a prototype when it comes to the development of a crop as it is one of the
that can deliver an effective system for making decisions [8]. three major factors responsible for crop growth.
They utilised a water pump, an ESP8266, an Infrared sensor, a
relay module, a soil moisture sensor, Blynk, and the Arduino
IDE.

P ROPOSED STRUCTURE
An IoT based water system plans to make use of the
implanted framework to make monitoring of planted areas
easy. Having sensors linked with the controller, the frame-
work measures the moisture, temperature etc. of soil and
subsequently the detected information is prepared within the
controller and sent to the user’s device via blynk cloud.
A. Hardware used Fig. 4. Moisture Sensor

NodeMCU ESP8266:: The NodeMCU ESP8266 is a Wi- Proximity Sensor:: Proximity sensor are used to detect ob-
Fi Silicon chip-set based micro controller. It has a 128KB jects approaching near. There are different types of proximity
memory and a storage size of 4megabytes, and is powered by sensors available like optical, capacitive, ultrasonic, inductive
a USB cable. and magnetic. We used an optical proximity sensor which
works on Infrared Red(IR) sensory modules for our use case.

Fig. 2. NodeMCU ESP8266 Circuit Board Fig. 5. Proximity Sensor

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B. Circuit Architecture pocket-sized, they are efficient, being pocket-sized, they are
lightweight as well. Since the sensors used are specific to one
domain, it being either temperature or moisture, they are often
proven to be very efficient in their manner of working.
Regulates and conserves water: The biggest advantage of
IoT based Smart Irrigation System is the amount of water it
saves because it knows exactly how much moisture the soil
and the crop needs and regulates the water flow accordingly.
It saves up to 50% of the total water consumption. Not only
that but because of the regulation of water flow, the risk of
over-perspiration in the soil which may lead to crop damage
also reduces exponentially.
Low maintenance and affordable: Having an IoT based
smart irrigation system might sound expensive to set up and
have high maintenance costs, but the sensors are quite cheap
and they also do not require much maintenance as well.
Because of this, it is actually quite helpful for farmers of
smaller scale as well.
The user is always up-to-date with field conditions :
Being an IoT based system, another perk is the real-time field
conditions like temperature check and moisture check you get
on your mobile device without even being in the field. You can
be anywhere in the world if you have an internet connection
and the sensors in the field are connected via a network, you
can check on your field conditions and increase or decrease
Fig. 6. Circuit Diagram of the Proposed System the water level being released in the field.
Once the devices were set up with the code that included the
A test system was created based on the simulated image data from the blynk libraries and secured with the authentica-
shown in Fig. 6 and the microcontroller was coded to run and tion key. The devices were using WiFi to access the internet.
receive an output directly in the computer. It was then tested They were powered by the standard 5W power adapter and
on the plants in a controlled environment. Once the test setup a micro-USB type cable. After doing a test run for a few
was complete. The next step was taken to create such a system hours, the system was deployed in two environments. One
that would run the monitoring system in a way that it would System was left in an unmonitored environment in an empty
not require a computer to be attached to it for it to run and room with indirect sunlight and watered infrequently. Another
provide an output. For this, the Blynk’s Cloud platform was system was put in a monitored environment where it received
used. Blynk is an online open-source platform for Internet of timely watering and also received ample sunlight. The data
Things devices. It provides an interface that helps in remotely extraction was done for 1 week in both the environments to
controlling the devices with the help of the internet. It also find out the trends in the following parameters:
creates interactive dashboards that help in visualizing the data
• Moisture
and keep an eye on the system without being near it. It mainly
• Humidity
consists of three modules:
• Temperature
• Blynk Server: This is responsible for the communication
• Proximity
of the device with the smartphone over the internet and
has the bandwidth of supporting thousands of IOT devices R ESULT ANALYSIS
including Raspberry Pi. You can run it privately or using
a public blynk server The data has been collected for a duration of a week to
• Blynk App: This provides various interfaces for you to properly understand the behavior and nature of the plant. The
interact with your system and control and monitor it data is depicted via graphs as shown below:
remotely
Moisture
• Blynk Libraries: These are the libraries responsible for
enabling communication to and from the device and As shown in Figure 7, the plant in the monitored en-
receive input and output commands. vironment shows a consistently higher moisture level when
compared to the one in the unmonitored environment. The
C. Advantages inconsistency of readings from the unmonitored environment
Light-Weight, simple and efficient : The sensors used can be seen in the sudden rise and fall of the moisture content
for this mechanism are not only fast, but they are also of the plant.

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 constant drops and rise of the temperature due to internal
factors of the plant such as low moisture higher humidity and
such.

Proximity

Fig. 7. Moisture Reading

Fig. 10. Proximity Reading

Figure 10 shows how the plant which was monitored

showed less intervention by rodents and external interference
while the unmonitored system faced uneven patterns and polar
opposite results in the proximity readings.

C ONCLUSION
Fig. 8. Humidity Reading
The goal of this research was to develop a system that
monitors the moisture, temperature and humidity of the field
Humidity and also keeps a check on any interference by rodents, insects
Just like the moisture levels mentioned above, It can be seen or any livestock in the field. The entire system has been created
in Figure 8 that the consistency of lower humidity levels as a and deployed on a pilot scale, and it wirelessly collects sensor
result of constant watering of the plants can be seen by the node data over the cloud using web services, while a both
plant of the monitored environment. The lower watering in the web and mobile based information visualization and decision
unmonitored environment denotes the higher humidity levels support system offers real-time insights based on the analysis
in the plant. of the sensor. This system sends the data collected by the
sensors to the end user or the server using the micro-controller
Temperature with very reasonable cost. The values that are collected by
the micro-controller are sent via the cloud service Blynk.
Apart from the above benefits it also includes the functionality
of storing the data which can be retrieved at any point for
further analysis. Two environments were observed for this
research, one depicting a controlled environment and another
depicting an uncontrolled and unmonitored environment. The
data collected from Blynk was visualized using graphs to
analyze the differences that occurred due to the environment
in which the plant was kept in. Our proposed system is easy
to use, economical, and updates in real time and through
our system, we were able to reach the conclusion that the
plant present in a monitored environment can sustain longer
with fewer intervention from rodents and lesser utilization of
resources.
Fig. 9. Temperature Reading
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