Enhanced Hydroponic Agriculture Environmental Monitoring: An Internet of Things Approach

Hydroponic cultivation is an agricultural method where nutrients are efficiently provided as mineral nutrient solutions. This modern agriculture sector provides numerous advantages such as efficient location and space requirements, adequate climate control, water-saving and controlled nutrients usage. The Internet of things (IoT) concept assumes that various things, which include not only communication devices but also every other physical object on the planet, are going to be connected and will be controlled across the Internet. Mobile computing technologies in general and mobile applications, in particular, can be assumed as significant methodologies to handle data analytics and data visualisation. Using IoT and mobile computing is possible to develop automatic systems for enhanced hydroponic agriculture environmental monitoring. Therefore, this paper presents an IoT monitoring system for hydroponics named iHydroIoT. The solution is composed of a prototype for data collection and an iOS mobile application for data consulting and real-time analytics. The collected data is stored using Plotly, a data analytics and visualisation library. The proposed system provides not only temporal changes monitoring of light, temperature, humidity, CO2, pH and electroconductivity but also water level for enhanced hydroponic supervision solutions. The iHydroIoT offers real-time notifications to alert the hydroponic farm manager when the conditions are not favourable. Therefore, the system is a valuable tool for hydroponics condition analytics and to support decision making on possible intervention to increase productivity. The results reveal that the system can generate a viable hydroponics appraisal, allowing to anticipate technical interventions that improve agricultural productivity.