Designing a Farmer Interface for Smart Irrigation in Developing Countries

Abstract

This paper presents an application designed for interfacing the farmers and the communications and control systems when automated irrigation is used. The proposed application allows visualization and compilation of the data collected by the sensors used in a smart agriculture system. The objective is to minimize the farmers' direct interaction with the technical apparatus. It also aims to allow the farmer or an authorized third party to modify the irrigation parameters without knowledge of the irrigation hardware system, given them control back of the irrigation when required. In this design, GSM communications networks are used due to their widespread implementation in developing countries, their extended coverage and relatively low cost in these countries.