Ayurvedic medicine Tulsi, Mint, Turmeric Land Farming with IoT

& Wireless Sensor Network

Abstract

Almost from the ancient and medieval times, medicinal plants are viewed with utmost reverence.
Medicinal herbs which have brawn to combat the terrible known and unknown diseases. At
present, people moderate the fact of significance of herbal plants. But, obviously they have their
genuine standard in medicinal field. In this paper, exploration prediction and geographical
location of herbal plants in hilly areas are detected using WSN technology.

The vital environmental factors that are responsible for the herbal plants sustainment in canopy
are soil and weather conditions which include the basic conditions like temperature, pH and
humidity. Usage of intelligent wireless sensors over a spread of forest land results with various
environmental conditions of the soil and weather which can possibly predict the sustainment of
all herbs.

A main server often called as “IOT” is also used to maintain a set of fixed database of certain
herbal plants that can possibly dwell in a particular area. A comparison is made between the
obtained real time sensor values and the database that is uploaded in the main server. Ultimately,
this setup helps medicinal field by telling the existence of precious herb in places where man can
hardly enter those places

INTRODUCTION

The lifecycle of any human being is based on several factors like the surrounding and his
environment around which he grows [6]. According to the U.N’s annual report in the health
analysis all over the world its estimated that the average human being life expectancy is only at
62 and there is a steady decline even though new breakthroughs are being made in the field of
modern medicinal field. The real reason being the aftermath effect of the pollution from all the
mediums via air, water and soil. Though the scientific world of medicine has achieved many
remarkable breakthroughs yet one reason why it’s still largely debated cause of no of reasons
where the patients have some allergic reactions. In stages where the artificial or man-made fails
one often looks up to nature. The only difference between the artificial and Ayurveda is that the
manmade would give a quick relief but an artificial one would give perhaps a slow one but a
complete relief which one would not accept form an artificial one. Even form the medieval times
the use of herbal plants or nature gift for our well-being is one which everyone looks at. This has
even been proved in our epic Vedas *5.Even today it’s estimated that the still a large amount of
herbs which are grown in wild are still yet to be discovered. In India, the herbs have been of
great significant. The proof of this is Ayurveda Society which is established and had its presence
felt in India for many decades. But the presence of this type of herbs is mostly in the hilly areas
and in the areas where the human population is a thin line. Hence the presence and the quantity
of herbal plant are not known in approximate details. Taking in the case of India alone, taking
alone an account of Tamil Nadu a large presence of herbs are found in the mountains of Kolli
hills and also in the hills of Agasthyamalai. The human expedition and also a constant study is
not possible as the climatic condition of these places are not suitable, its reasons like this that the
use of Ayurveda plants have become pretty less.

This project is aimed at implementing small sensors to form a WSN system to aid in ayurvedic
farming where it is very essential to grow herbs at proper soil conditions like temperature,
humidity etc.,. By integrating the Wireless Sensor Network and Internet of Things (IoT), the
sensor values are uploaded to main sever. The values uploaded to server are compared with
threshold values hence the plant conditions can be monitored.

Different medicinal plants like tulsi, mint, turmeric need different climatic conditions. So this
project can be used to study the required conditions for growing different ayurvedic herbs.

Fig Tulsi Farm

Example:
To grow Tulsi conditions required are :
 Bright, indirect light
 Temperature - 75 to 80 degrees F during the day and 5 to 10 degrees cooler at night.
 Moist at all times.

Literature survey
There are many systems for remote monitoring and control designed as commercial products or
experimental research platforms. It is noticed that most of the research carried out belongs to the
following categories a. Internet based Monitoring using Servers, GPRS modems, etc. with
different approaches. b. GSM-SMS protocols using GSM module individually or in combination
with Internet Technologies. c. Monitoring using Wireless Sensor Networks. d. Wireless
Monitoring using Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, Zigbee and RF. e. Applications have varied widely like
Home Automation, Security Systems, Biomedical applications, Agriculture, Environment,
Reservoir, Bridge health monitoring, etc.
Internet monitoring is one of the common approaches for remote monitoring. Many researchers
have worked in field of Internet based remote monitoring. (Saito et al., 2000) developed home
gateway system for interconnecting home network consisting of IEEE 1394 AV network and X10
power line home automation network with Internet. This provided remote access functions from
Internet for digital AV appliances like Digital Video Camera, Digital VCR connected to IEEE
1394 network and home appliances like TV, desk lamp, electric fan connected to X10 controller.
(Al-Ali and Al-Rousan, 2004) developed Java based home automation system via World Wide
Web. The home appliances were controlled from ports of embedded system board connected to
PC based server at home. With the wide spread use of cellular networks, this approach is also
popular when small amount of data is to be transferred through the network. Extensive work has
been carried out by researchers using this approach especially in medical field. (Chen Peijiang
and Jiang Xuehua, 2008) describe a remote monitoring system based on SMS of GSM. The
system includes two parts which are the monitoring center and the remote monitoring station.
The monitoring center consists of a computer and a TC35 GSM communication module. The
computer and TC35 are connected by RS232. The remote monitoring station includes a TC35
GSM communication module, a MSP430F149 MCU, a display unit, various sensors, data
gathering and processing unit. (Scanaill et al., 2006) developed a tele-monitoring system, based
on short message service (SMS), to remotely monitor the long-term mobility levels of elderly
people in their natural environment. Mobility is measured by an accelerometer-based portable
unit, worn by each monitored subject. The portable unit houses the Analog Devices ADuC812S
microcontroller board, Falcon A2D-1 GSM modem, and a battery-based power supply. Two
integrated accelerometers are connected to the portable unit through the analog inputs of the
microcontroller. Mobility level summaries are transmitted hourly, as an SMS message, directly
from the portable unit to a remote server for long-term analysis. Each subject’s mobility levels
are monitored using custom-designed mobility alert software, and the appropriate medical
personnel are alerted by SMS if the subject’s mobility levels decrease. Many Wireless
Technologies like RF, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and Zigbee have been developed and remote monitoring
systems using these technologies are popular due to flexibility, low operating charges, etc. Today
Wireless Sensor Network are used into an increasing number of commercial solutions, aimed at
implementing distributed monitoring and control system in a great number of different
application areas. (Wijetunge et al., 2008) designed a general purpose controlling module
designed with the capability of controlling and sensing up to five devices simultaneously. The
communication between the controlling module and the remote server is done using Bluetooth
technology. The server can communicate with many such modules simultaneously. The
controller is based on ATMega64 microcontroller and Bluetooth communication TDK Blu2i
(Class 1) module which provides a serial interface for data communication. The designed
controller was deployed in a home automation application for a selected set of electrical
appliances.
Features
 Collecting all sensor data and upload to server.

 Comparision between obtained sensor value and threshold value.

Problem Definition
Complexity involved in monitoring climatic parameters like humidity, soil moisture,
illumination, soil pH, temperature, etc. which directly or indirectly govern the plant growth.
Investment in the automation process are high, as today’s control systems are designed for only
one parameter monitoring to control more than one parameter simultaneously there will be a
need to buy more than one system. High maintenance and need for skilled technical labour. The
modern proposed systems use the mobile technology as the communication schemes and
wireless data acquisition systems, providing global access to the information about one’s farms.
But it suffers from various limitations like design complexity, inconvenient repairing and high
price. Also the reliability of the system is relatively low, and when there are malfunctions in local
devices, all local and tele data will be lost and hence the whole system collapses. Moreover
farmers in India do not work under such sophisticated environment and find no necessity of such
an advanced system, and cannot afford the same. Keeping these issues in view, an IOT based
monitoring and control system is designed to find implementation in the near future that will
help Indian farmers.

Existing system

The system involves visual inspection of the plant growth, manual irrigation of plants, turning
ON and OFF the temperature controllers, manual spraying of the fertilizers and pesticides. It is
time consuming, vulnerable to human error and hence less accurate and unreliable.

Proposed system

The system is fully automated. It mainly consists of the sensing part, controlling part, monitoring
part and data uploading.

Methodology

All the devices are initialized, like

LCD, GPRS, sensors etc.

All the sensor data monitored are

uploaded to server via gprs

The data obtained are compared with

threshold value.
System Architecture
R5F100LEA microcontroller from Renesas RL78 series which is a 16-bit microcontroller
is used to implement this project. Microcontroller acts as the heart of this project, which controls
the whole system. It contains of Flash ROM 64KB, RAM 4KB and Data Flash 4KB, and it has
High speed on-chip oscillator, Self-reprogrammable under software control, 58 GPIO’s, 3
UART’s, Simplified I2C, 10 bit resolution ADC, 28 Interrupt Sources, ISP programming support
etc.

Block Diagram

LCD
Water level
sensor

Moisture Renesas (RL78)

GPRS Web
Sensor
Server

Temperature
Sensor
Relay

LDR

Water Pump
Motor

DESCRIPTION

Many embedded systems have substantially different designs according to their functions
and utilities. In this project design, structured modular design concept is adopted and the system
is mainly composed of a microcontroller rl78, LCD, temperature sensor, humidity sensor, ldr,
moisture sensor, water pump motor and GSM/GPRS.
Temperature sensors - to sense temperature of farm area - to find whether the soil temperature is
suitable for growing herbs.

Humidity sensors - to sense humidity in the agriculture field/farm and to find out whether
required humidity is present in the soil for seeding.

Moisture sensor – to sense the soil moisture level.

LDR – Light dependent resistor – To sense the brightness in the environment.

The data from the above sensors are passed through an in built ADC to the microcontroller. The
digital data is then processed by the controller and compared with the preset thresholds which are
found to be suitable for growing these ayurvedic herbs. If found suitable then a relay is latched
by controller to operate the water pump motor and allow seeds to be sown.The GPRS is used as a
messaging service from microcontroller which updates the server for further monitoring.The
information like humidity, temperature and photosynthesis level are displayed on alphanumeric
LCD.

Demo points:

A prototype module will be developed for the project. It includes individual PCB boards for all
interfaces according to the block diagram. Every PCB will be inter-connected with jumper wires.

The sensors value like temperature value, moisture level, soil condition, light intensity are
measured using respective sensors mentioned in block diagram.

The obtained value is uploaded to server

For demo purpose the Amazon server is used.

Components List
Hardware’s used

 Renesas64 pin (RL78)

 Temperature Sensor
 Humidity Sensor
 LDR
 Alphanumeric LCD
 GSM\GPRS Module
 Water Pump Motor
Softwares Used

 Cubesuite+
 Renesas Flash Programmer

Advantages
 A simple economical module has been designed here - useful for agriculturists.
 Easy to develop and maintain.
 Can use server data for soil analysis.
 Manual operation has been reduced to major extent.

 Efficient and reliable

Disadvantages
 The sensors have to be robust and should be cased properly.
 Carrying power supply.

Future Scope:
We know that different herbs used in ayurvedic medicine needs different climatic or
environmental conditions. This project helps in the farmer in meticulously planning which herb
to grow in which season since he would have got an update of the farm conditions through the
WSN.
References:
 New concepts in agricultural automation, Simon Blackmore
 Preliminary Design on the Development of Wireless Sensor Network for Paddy Rice
Cropping Monitoring Application in Malaysia
 Muhamad Azman Miskam, Collaborative Microelectronic Design Excellence Centre,
Universiti Sains Malaysia
 Engineering Campus, 14300 Nibong Tebal, Sri Ampangan, Pulau Pinang, Malaysia