IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - July/August 2021 - 52

Smart Agriculture
increases the quality of production by intensively
using cost-effective and energy-efficient information
and communication technologies. SSA uses
various consumer electronics (CE) devices in the
applications, including greenhouse monitoring,
smart irrigation system, animal tracking, etc.
SSA involves a large number of interconnected
sensors to monitor the agricultural field. These
sensors generate a huge amount of sensory data
that can be used to train different prediction models
of artificial intelligence. Such sensory data
transmission from different CE devices in SSA
incorporates short-range or long-range communication
protocols depending upon the size of data
and distance to be covered. Example of the communication
protocols are Bluetooth low energy,
WiFi direct, Zig-Bee, and IPv6 low-power wireless
personal area network.
SSA incorporates Internet of Things (IoT) technology
to make an interconnected network of
various agriculture sensors and CE devices. It
improves operational efficiency, maximizes yield,
and minimizes wastage through the use of realtime
data collection, data analysis, and the deployment
of control mechanisms. This work mainly
focuses on: How to use CE for smart agriculture?We
try to cover vast applications that are influenced
by the advancement of sensor technology. With
these applications, this article illustrates the following
ways CE can improve agriculture.
CE can automate multiple processes and,
therefore, increases the efficiency of agriculture.
For example, the smart irrigation system
switch ON or OFF the water pump based
on the water level and climate conditions.
Similarly, fertilizing or pest control.
Collected data by smart agriculture sensors
can be used to monitor the soil health,
growth of the crops, animal husbandry, and
performance of the equipment efficiency.
CEprovide better control over the internal processes,
which reduces the production risks.
Prediction of the output of agriculture production
helps to improve postharvesting activities.
Examples of such activities are grain storage,
transportation of the crops, inventorymanagement,
ormaintaining the freshness of the crop.
CE can detect anomalies in crop growth or livestock
health. For example, leaf disease identification
in the early stage mitigates the risks of
losing the yield.
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CE enhance product quality and volumes,
achieve better control over the production
process, and maintain higher standards of
crop quality and growth capacity through
automation.
In this article, we present an overview of various
applications, advancement, and challenges
in SSA using different CE devices. We also
present a taxonomy of different applications
with communication protocols and emerging
futuristic techniques. These techniques increase
the efficiency of SSA and lead to enhancing its
acceptability.
APPLICATIONS AND
ADVANCEMENTS IN SMART SENSING
FOR AGRICULTURE
This section presents the existing work on
applications and advancements in SSA. We use
bottom to top approach, i.e., soil, irrigation, leaf,
crop, and harvesting. We next discuss the applications
of sensors in animal husbandry. Finally,
we discuss about futuristic techniques. Figure 1
illustrates the taxonomy of applications in SSA.
Table 1 illustrates the state-of-the-art smart sensors
used for agriculture.
Soil Health Monitoring
Soil health plays a decisive role in improving
the production of agricultural goods. Sensorsbased
soil health monitoring has strengthened
the cost-effective and efficient analysis of soil
content. It leads to enhancing the quality of
agriculture goods and, hence, increases the monetary
benefits of farmers. The primary applications
of SSA include the estimation of nitrates
and phosphates concentration, soil moisture
detection, determining soil compaction, developing
nutrients recommendation system, detecting
capsaicin concentration, classifying soil
fertility, and land classification.3,4
Soil health monitoring determines the concentration
of different elements (or nutrients)
that affects the productivity and quality of
the agricultural products. Thus, prior estimation
and tracking of these nutrients are beneficial in
terms of providing cost-effectiveness and quality
improvement. The CE devices with different sensors
help in monitoring the concentration of
nitrates, phosphates, capsaicin, etc. The alert
messages are transmitted to the smartphones of
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