Green Thumb Engineering: Artificial intelligence for managing IoT enabled houseplants

Abstract

Many hobbies and household activities can be carried out with little effort, and without deeper understanding of the phenomenon at hand. Managing houseplants and herbs is such a hobby; one can simply provide water for plants and hope they would prosper. However, some people seem to have a better luck in maintaining their plants, while many fail and claim they do not possess a 'green thumb'. Fortunately, this does not require magic, but engineering. We use innovative Internet of Things and artificial intelligence technologies to monitor and analyze moisture, humidity, luminosity and temperature levels to assist end users for optimization of environmental conditions for their houseplants, simultaneously increasing their understanding of plant life. For plant health monitoring, we construct a system yielding the normalized difference vegetation index, supported by visual validation by users. We run the system for a selected plant, basil, in varying environmental conditions to cater for typical home conditions in pursue of bootstrapping our artificial intelligence with the acquired data. For end users, we implement a web based user interface which provides both instructions and explanations.