Multimodal Plant Healthcare Flexible Sensor System

TLDR

The rising global population and environmental stresses demand higher plant productivity while balancing ecosystems, yet probing plant physiological health remains difficult due to biological complexity. The authors propose an integrated multimodal flexible sensor system for plant growth management. The system uses stacked ZnIn₂S₄ nanosheets as the core sensing media. The ZIS-based sensor achieves a ~4 ms light response, stable humidity monitoring, and, via tunneling-dominated current, enables long‑term (>15 days) visual recording of dehydration, supporting precise plant–machine biointerfaces for efficient resource use.

Abstract

The rising global human population and increased environmental stresses require a higher plant productivity while balancing the ecosystem using advanced nanoelectronic technologies. Although multifunctional wearable devices have played distinct roles in human healthcare monitoring and disease diagnosis, probing potential physiological health issues in plants poses a formidable challenge due to their biological complexity. Herein an integrated multimodal flexible sensor system is proposed for plant growth management using stacked ZnIn2S4(ZIS) nanosheets as the kernel sensing media. The proposed ZIS-based flexible sensor can not only perceive light illumination at a fast response (∼4 ms) but also monitor the humidity with a perdurable steady performance that has yet to be reported elsewhere. First-principles calculations reveal that the tunneling effect dominates the current model associated with humidity response. This finding guides the investigation on the plant stomatal functions by measuring plant transpiration. Significantly, dehydration conditions are visually recorded during a monitoring period (>15 days). This work may contribute to plant–machine biointerfaces to precisely manage plant health status and judiciously utilize limited resources.