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Converting a Plant to a Battery and Wireless Sensorwith Scatter Radio and Ultra-Low Cost

Bletsas Aggelos, Koutroulis Eftychios, Konstantopoulos Christos, Mitianoudis Nikolaos

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Summary

Electric Potential (EP) signals are produced inplants through intracellular processes, in response to externalstimuli (e.g. watering, mechanical stress, light, acquisition ofnutrients). However, wireless transmission of a massive amountof biologic EP signals (from one or multiple plants) is hinderedby existing, battery-operated wireless technology and increased,associated monetary cost. In this paper, a self-powered,battery-less EP wireless sensor is presented that harvestsnear-maximum energy from the plant itself and transmits the EPsignal tens-of-meters away with a single switch, based oninherently low-cost and low-power bistatic scatter radioprinciples. The experimental results confirm the ability of theproposed wireless plant sensor to achieve a fully-autonomousoperation by harvesting the energy generated by the plant itself.Also, EP signals experimentally acquired by the proposedwireless sensor from multiple plants, have been processed usingNon-negative Matrix Factorization (NMF), demonstrating strongcorrelation with environmental light irradiation intensity andplant watering. The proposed low-cost, battery-less“plant-as-sensor-and-battery” instrumentation approach is afirst but solid step towards large-scale electrophysiology studiesof important socioeconomic impact in ecology, plant biology, aswell as precision agriculture.

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