Harnessing sensors, smart devices and AI could transform agriculture

Biosensing engineer Azahar Ali, assistant professor of animal science and biosystems engineering at Virginia Tech, is preparing for the arrival of the fourth agricultural revolution.

It is an era that is predicted to harness the transformative potential of connected technologies arising from the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Ali said three of his technologies stand out for their potential to advance climate-smart precision agriculture: wearable agricultural sensors, Internet of Things-enabled (“smart”) devices, and artificial intelligence (AI). I’ll tell you.

in review Issuer advanced intelligent systemAli and his colleagues Matin Ataei Kachouei from the Department of Animal Sciences and Ajeet Kaushik from the Florida Institute of Technology are bringing together these cutting-edge technologies to help agricultural sectors around the world improve food safety and quality, and improve plant safety. This could lead to a paradigm shift in the way we monitor our health and productivity.

For Ali, prioritizing rapid, accurate and early monitoring will be key to sustainably and safely feeding the world’s rapidly growing population. The population is expected to reach nearly 10 billion by 2050, and more than 50 percent of the food will be needed to sustain the global food supply chain. According to the article.

According to the 2023 Global Agricultural Productivity (GAP) report released through the Faculty of Agriculture and Life Sciences, global agricultural productivity growth has contracted significantly and current efforts to sustainably expand production is insufficient.

Mr Ali said researchers needed to work together to harness the full potential of new technologies to help producers meet future demands. Agronomists need to collaborate with experts in engineering, human and veterinary medicine, and materials science.

“There is a huge gap in this kind of cooperation,” Ali said. “I’m developing sensors, but we need to collaborate with machine learning experts. We need to collaborate even more to solve the food crisis.”

In their article, Ali, Kachouei, and Kaushik described recent advances by researchers in applying sensors, smart devices, and AI to food and plant monitoring. We also discuss the opportunities and challenges of combining technologies.

They write that food sensor technology is making remarkable advances with a focus on measuring toxins, humidity, pH, freshness, temperature, contaminants, and pathogens. Monitoring these factors is key to food safety, food quality, and high packaging standards.

The researchers explained how these sensing capabilities can be enhanced by combining them with other technologies. By combining sensors and smart devices, food, livestock, and plant sensing systems can accurately collect data in real time, on-site, and at scale. scale. Next-generation networks will be able to rapidly transmit large amounts of data generated by those systems.

AI has the potential to streamline data analysis through automatic data processing, the researchers write. AI has the potential to take on the large amount of data generated by smart sensors, Ali said. Smart devices and AI also offer the potential for predictive analytics, allowing producers to predict challenges such as disease outbreaks and weather patterns in advance.

Throughout the article, Ali et al. discuss how researchers are currently developing electrochemical sensors and using microneedle-based sensors to detect disease biomarkers in milk, orange juice, and apple juice. He highlighted examples of how they are exploring the integration of multiple technologies. A plant sensor integrated with his smartphone-based 3D printed device to detect viruses within tomatoes.

While Ali and his colleagues see promise in these solutions, they also noted existing challenges in leveraging the technologies of the Fourth Agricultural Revolution. There are security concerns with data collection using smart sensors. The cost of sensors, network infrastructure, and data management can be prohibitive. Also, using your smart device in rural or remote areas where there are many farms may cause internet connectivity issues.

To address these challenges, Ali reiterated the need for cooperation between scientists, policy makers and farmers. “We need to work together to solve common problems,” he said.