Compliant plant wearables for localized microclimate and plant growth monitoring

TLDR

The microclimate surrounding a plant strongly influences its health and photosynthesis, and remotely monitoring these conditions can improve plant survival and agricultural yield. The study aims to deploy lightweight, plant‑mounted sensors to monitor local microclimate. The authors create flexible, biocompatible, low‑power wearables integrated onto plants, coupled with a 3D‑printed origami PlantCopter platform to autonomously capture temperature, humidity, strain, and growth‑rate data. The wearables successfully measure temperature, humidity, strain, and plant elongation, enabling continuous assessment of optimal growth conditions.

Abstract

Abstract The microclimate surrounding a plant has major effect on its health and photosynthesis process, where certain plants struggle in suboptimal environmental conditions and unbalanced levels of humidity and temperature. The ability to remotely track and correlate the effect of local environmental conditions on the healthy growth of plants can have great impact for increasing survival rate of plants and augmenting agriculture output. This necessitates the widespread distribution of lightweight sensory devices on the surface of each plant. Using flexible and biocompatible materials coupled with a smart compact design for a low power and lightweight system, we develop widely deployed, autonomous, and compliant wearables for plants. The demonstrated wearables integrate temperature, humidity and strain sensors, and can be intimately deployed on the soft surface of any plant to remotely and continuously evaluate optimal growth settings. This is enabled through simultaneous detection of environmental conditions while quantitatively tracking the growth rate (viz. elongation). Finally, we establish a nature-inspired origami-assembled 3D-printed “PlantCopter”, used as a launching platform for our plant wearable to enable widespread microclimate monitoring in large fields.