Smartphone Applications Targeting Precision Agriculture Practices—A Systematic Review

Abstract

Traditionally farmers have used their perceptual sensorial systems to diagnose and monitor their crops health and needs. However, humans possess five basic perceptual systems with accuracy levels that can change from human to human which are largely dependent on the stress, experience, health and age. To overcome this problem, in the last decade, with the help of the emergence of smartphone technology, new agronomic applications were developed to reach better, cost-effective, more accurate and portable diagnosis systems. Conventional smartphones are equipped with several sensors that could be useful to support near real-time usual and advanced farming activities at a very low cost. Therefore, the development of agricultural applications based on smartphone devices has increased exponentially in the last years. However, the great potential offered by smartphone applications is still yet to be fully realized. Thus, this paper presents a literature review and an analysis of the characteristics of several mobile applications for use in smart/precision agriculture available on the market or developed at research level. This will contribute to provide to farmers an overview of the applications type that exist, what features they provide and a comparison between them. Also, this paper is an important resource to help researchers and applications developers to understand the limitations of existing tools and where new contributions can be performed.

Automatic Grapevine Trunk Detection on UAV-Based Point Cloud

“…In a short period of time PA approaches and practices have become very popular and were introduced in all agricultural sectors [9]. The vine and wine sector is among those that have most benefited of precision farming techniques, applied to optimise vineyard performance [10].…”

Machine Learning Modeling of Wine Sensory Profiles and Color of Vertical Vintages of Pinot Noir Based on Chemical Fingerprinting, Weather and Management Data

“…Other wineries keep records of physicochemical characteristics and/or sensory profiles related to berry and wine quality traits, either done at chemistry laboratories or in-house, with some of these vineyards with records of more than 15 growing seasons. Keeping with digital technological advances, these management tools can be found in the form of computer, smartphone, and tablet PC applications for portability and easy access to records [2]. However, there have been minimal attempts to analyze these records using new and emerging tools, such as data mining and machine learning.…”

Advances in Plant Disease Detection and Monitoring: From Traditional Assays to In-Field Diagnostics

“…For example, using consumer-class quadcopter drone with smartphone connectivity ( Figure 9 ), for in-field nucleic acid-based diagnostics, Priye et al [ 154 ] demonstrated flight replication of Staphylococcus aureus and λ-phage DNA targets in less than 20 min. Smartphone technology can also contribute to more accurate, smart, and portable diagnosis systems [ 155 , 156 ] in which connectivity, high-quality images, and processing capacity of these devices could help farmers and institutions in fighting plant diseases, all over the world. All these technologies are able to communicate to each other and open new avenues for fighting plant pathogens and their spreading, in an efficient and intuitive way.…”