IoT Agri-Care Advisor Mobile Application for Monitoring Paddy Plant Health and Delivering Smart Farmer Advisory Toward Sustainable Agriculture

The agriculture sector significantly supplies rice, which is a staple food in Malaysia. Thus, there is a considerable demand for an increase in paddy production. However, the quality of soil is crucial to the health of paddy. This is because poor soil quality leads to unhealthy paddy, which results in the degradation of crop yields. In addition, traditional methods and hardware-based monitoring systems are often inaccessible to farmers with limited technical knowledge. Thus, this research aims to develop and evaluate an innovative mobile application named IoT Agri-Care Advisor to assist farmers with real-time soil analysis and nutrient advisory on the paddy health. This is done by measuring and collecting levels of nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, electrical conductivity, and potential Hydrogen of the soil nutrients through embedded sensors. Then, the collected data are transmitted to the cloud, which will be analyzed and used to generate advice for the farmers. Firebase is used to ensure secure data storage and real-time synchronization. In addition, this developed mobile application has several easy-to-use features such as interactive maps, historical data visualization, and customized advice to the farmers. The application was tested on two types of paddy fields—general and plowed—in Perlis, Malaysia. Results showed variations in soil nutrient levels in the general and plowed paddy fields, which guided specific fertilizer recommendations. Hence, this IoT Agri-Care Advisor mobile application offers a promising solution for enhancing agricultural practices, supporting food security, and sustainable farming in Malaysia.