Sustainable Practices: Smartwatches for Plants?

Could Fitbit’s newest brand ambassador be a Brazilian soy plant?

Smartwatches and other wearable technology are becoming increasingly sophisticated, so much so that these devices are no longer amenities exclusive to humans. For several years, scientists have been investigating how these wearable devices that monitor our wellbeing could be adapted to track plant health in real-time and aid cultivation choices. Agriculture and crops are essential to both our food security and our economy. However, efficient and sustainable farming practices (i.e. large yield with small environmental consequences) are difficult to achieve when several factors harm plant health.¹ These include the salt levels of water, ultraviolet radiation, ozone exposure, and toxic agents, but the major forces are pests, diseases, and drought stress, resulting in significant yield losses.^1,2,3 There is an urgent need for plant wearables which can monitor growth, loss of water content in leaves, climate, and any other relevant indicators which can assist in gauging plant wellness.^1,2

When researchers began designing wearables for plants, many obstacles had to be considered. The devices had to be able to attach to the plant, flexible enough to match the plant’s motion, built to withstand deformation and fluctuating climate conditions, and unobtrusive to the plant’s natural processes, all while reporting accurate data.¹ One of the biggest challenges had to do with electrode sensors in the wearables. These sensors had to be placed on the leaves to measure the plants’ signals, similarly to electrode patches which monitor heart activity in humans when placed on the chest. However, selecting electrodes which were compatible to the plants’ biological processes, as well as attaching them to the plant’s leaves, proved to be very difficult. Leaves’ irregular shape, hairy surface structures, and shrivelling all caused poor adhesion between the electrode and the leaves, leading to faulty data collection.^1,3 Additionally, electrodes could disrupt photosynthesis in plants by blocking out light, which seriously harms plant health instead of monitoring it.¹ Nevertheless, a wearable for soy plants was successfully developed just last year. The team consisted of researchers at the Campus Bio-Medico University of Rome, who proposed the methods, and technologists at the Brazilian Nanotechnology National Laboratory, who created the wearable to monitor water loss and indirectly assess exposure to pests and toxic agents.^1,2,3