Clivia biosensor: Soil moisture identification based on electrophysiology signals with deep learning

Research has shown that plants have the ability to detect environmental changes and generate electrical signals in response. These electrical signals can regulate the physiological state of plants and produce corresponding feedback. This suggests that plants have the potential to be used as biosensors for monitoring environmental information. However, there are current challenges in linking environmental information with plant electrical signals, especially in collecting and classifying the corresponding electrical signals under soil moisture gradients. This study documented the electrical signals of clivia under different soil moisture gradients and created a dataset for classifying electrical signals. Subsequently, we proposed a lightweight convolutional neural network (CNN) model (PlantNet) for classifying the electrical signal dataset. Compared to traditional CNN models, our model achieved optimal classification performance with the lowest computational resource consumption. The model achieved an accuracy of 99.26%, precision of 99.31%, recall of 92.26%, F1-score of 99.21%, with 0.17M parameters, a size of 7.17MB, and 14.66M FLOPs. Therefore, this research provides scientific evidence for the future development of plants as biosensors for detecting soil moisture, and offers insight into developing plants as biosensors for detecting signals such as ozone, PM2.5, Volatile Organic Compounds(VOCs), and more. These studies are expected to drive the development of environmental monitoring technology and provide new pathways for better understanding the interaction between plants and the environment.