Plant-O-Meter

About

Crop monitoring is one of the most important tasks in modern farming. Timely and comprehensive information about plant growth can help farmers make optimal decisions regarding irrigation, application of fertilizer, and with the whole post-harvest process, including logistics and sales. By acting quickly and in an appropriate manner, farmers can increase their yields, minimize losses, and improve the quality of produce, thus achieving higher prices on the market.Plant health status is usually detected by manual inspection, which is a very imprecise process and allows detecting plant health issues only when visible symptoms occur – typically, too late. Our aim is to develop an industrialized, portable, low-cost optical device for plant health monitoring: Plant-O-Meter, which can calculate more than 20 vegetation indices that indicate the occurrence of drought, heat, malnutrition or pest-related stress at different growth stages of crops. Device characteristics allow for real-time crop monitoring and can be used either as a handheld device or as an add-on for agricultural machinery, when it is even possible to dose the amount of fertilizer or pesticide on-the-go.