Internet-of-Things-Based Multiple-Sensor Monitoring System for Soil Information Diagnosis Using a Smartphone

The rise of Internet of Things (IoT) technology has moved the digital world in a new direction and is considered the third wave of the information industry. To meet the current growing demand for food, the agricultural industry should adopt updated technologies and smart agriculture based on the IoT which will strongly enable farmers to reduce waste and increase productivity. This research presents a novel system for the application of IoT technology in agricultural soil measurements, which consists of multiple sensors (temperature and moisture), a micro-processor, a microcomputer, a cloud platform, and a mobile phone application. The wireless sensors can collect and transmit soil information in real time with a high speed, while the mobile phone app uses the cloud platform as a monitoring center. A low power consumption is specified in the hardware and software, and a modular power supply and time-saving algorithm are adopted to improve the energy effectiveness of the nodes. Meanwhile, a novel soil information prediction strategy was explored based on the deep Q network (DQN) reinforcement learning algorithm. Following the weighted combination of a bidirectional long short-term memory, online sequential extreme learning machine, and parallel extreme machine learning, the DQN Bi-OS-P prediction model was obtained. The proposed data acquisition system achieved a long-term stable and reliable collection of time-series soil data with equal intervals and provided an accurate dataset for the precise diagnosis of soil information. The RMSE, MAE, and MAPE of the DQN Bi-OS-P were all reduced, and the R2 was improved by 0.1% when compared to other methods. This research successfully implemented the smart soil system and experimentally showed that the time error between the value displayed on the mobile phone app and its exact acquisition moment was no more than 3 s, proving that mobile applications can be effectively used for the real-time monitoring of soil quality and conditions in wireless multi-sensing based on the Internet of Things.