Design and development of wearable sensor textile for precision agriculture

Abstract

In last decade, there has been immense focus on the detection of human activities using wearable sensors for applications such as health-care and fitness. In this paper we focus on agriculture applications and present a wearable sensor shirt, which can be conveniently worn by the farmers for the detection of the agriculture activities like digging, harvesting and bed making. The knowledge of agricultural activities being performed on the farm is important for rendering the advisory services to the remotely located farmers in order to improve their crop yield. We have designed a wearable sensor shirt with acceleration sensors stitched to the wrists and interfaced to the mobile phone through an arduino board. The experimental results depict the detection of various agricultural activities like Manual digging, Harvesting, Bed making and Sowing. A comparative analysis in terms of classification accuracy has been performed by considering different number of sensors and their placement on the farmer's body.