Proc.

of the 2018 IEEE 5th International Conference on Smart Instrumentation, Measurement and Applications (ICSIMA 2018)
28-30 November 2018, Songkhla, Thailand

Development of Android Application for Pest

Infestation Early Warning System
Haidawati Nasir, Ahmad Nazrin Aris, Adidah
Lajis
UniKL Malaysian Institute of Information
Technology
1016 Jalan Sultan Ismail
50250 Kuala Lumpur
{haidawati,adidahl}@unikl.edu.my
Kushsairy Kadir
UniKL, British Malaysia Institute,
Batu 8 Jalan Gombak,
53100 Gombak, Selangor,
kushsairy@unikl.edu.my
Sairul I Safie
UniKL Malaysian Institute of Industrial
Technology, Bandar Seri Alam,
81750 Masai, Johor
sairulizwan@unikl.edu.my

Abstract— Rice production has become more important as
Malaysian’s rice demand is expected to increase annually. In
order to fulfill the rice demand of the growing population and
with the target rice self-sufficiency by 100% [1], Malaysia has to
increase its rice productivity. But, one of the major problems
faced by the rice sector is the pest attacks. Thus, there is a need
to have an early warning system to alert the paddy farmer on the
infestation of the pest at early stages. This paper aims to design
an early warning system of pest infestation for paddy farming,
which consists of Android Apps and a web-based application.
The system will be used by the Agriculture Department to detect
the occurrence of pest infestation, identifying their location and
report to the early warning system. The system will be able to
record the infestation data provided by the farmers into the
databases. The information will be used by the Agronomist to
assess the risk of the paddy plot. There are 4 stages of risk; Low,
Medium, High and Very High. Every stage will be classified by
the amount of pest, type of pest, location and current situation.
After a complete evaluation from the Agronomist, the system will
notify the farmers through email about the quality of their
current paddy plot.
monitoring the pest attacks. The pest reporting process is
facilitated by the provided list of pests and plot locations
stored in the system database. Thus, the pest attacks can be
reported to the system quickly.
The application is divided into two parts; the first one is an
Android-based application used by the officers to make a
report, and the second part is the web-based application that
will be employed by the Agriculture Department to monitor
the pest attacks. When the officer reports the pest infestation,
the infected paddy plot location is sent to the server. This
location will be displayed on the map and the attack will be
assessed. The system will then send a warning message with
the suggested control code to the farmer. The farmers will take
necessary action based on the suggested control code as soon
as possible to avoid spreading of the infestation.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. A brief
review of the background is presented in the next section. In
Section 3, the methodology of the proposed system will be
described. Results are presented in Section 4. The conclusion
and the future work will be addressed in Section 5.

Keywords— Mobile Application Development, Pest Infestation

System II. RELATED WORKS
There is a great deal of the Android applications alert system
I. INTRODUCTION and agriculture in the literature. The system in [3] uses a
mobile phone to detect the activities around the farm. The
system will collect the data through the mobile phone (GPS,
There are a few major problems faced by the rice sector in the
accelerometer and microphone sensor) carried by the farmers.
agriculture sector and the one that we need to be concern now
By obtaining the GPS coordinates, the system can obtain the
is the pest problems at the paddy field. How to minimize the
statistics of the working pattern of any farm worker and
issues is a challenge. The Brown Rice Hopper is one of the
frequency of visit to a certain area (different plots) of the farm.
notorious pest of rice farming [2]. The Brown Rice hopper
The work in [4] uses of Android mobile to increase
feeds on rice plants. The data on type of pests, paddy plot
productivity of crops and indirectly increase the knowledge of
location and control code used in this paper are given by
the farmer society.
Integrated Agricultural Development Agency (IADA) Kuala
In [5], the Android apps make use of the alerts published
Selangor as a case study.
by the Global Disaster Alert and Coordination System
Currently, the Agriculture Department in Kuala Selangor
(GDACS). The app shows icons on the map with color green,
uses a stand-alone system in which their agronomists/officers
orange and red, each mapping the severity of the calamities.
perform field inspection and record the data manually to the
StormTracker [6] makes use of the NOWrad (National
system. This work aims to design and create an Android-based
Operational Weather radar) which gives one of the best
application that can help the process of reporting and
resolution cloud imagery with color codes. It also gives 10-
 Proc. of the 2018 IEEE 5th International Conference on Smart Instrumentation, Measurement and Applications (ICSIMA 2018)
28-30 November 2018, Songkhla, Thailand
day forecasts with both daily and hourly details. Users can agronomist. The agronomist then submits the report to the
also lock their favorite locations to keep track of the local server. Next, the admin will review the data and send the level
area. of infestation to the farmers.
WebGIS (Geographic Information System) Expert System
for Rice Brown Hopper Disaster Early-Warning [7] can
perform disaster evaluation and disaster early-warning. The
WebGIS is known for its features to locate and mark area in
large scale. It is used to relate how the insects are spreading
on the fields. Most importantly, the farmers need to know
about the current situation so that they can react before the
insects spread out.
Early Detection and Distribution Mapping System for the
Southeast Exotic Pest Plant Council [8] was developed to fill
up the species distribution of invasive plant throughout South
America. The location of the data are various, in different
formats, and unfitting to produce an overall map. The use of
Google Map, instead of the flash map Area Selector and
Adobe Flash technology has solved the problem of combining
the available data from different locations.

III. METHODOLOGY
The methodology used to develop an Android Application
for early warning system can be seen in Figure 1, and the brief Fig. 2: Block Diagram of the proposed system
description of each stage is as follows:

A. Software Requirements Analysis

At this stage, the requirements of the system are gathered by
studying the current system and meeting sessions with the
Agriculture Department Personnel. This is necessary in
specifying functional requirements and defining overall
system architecture for the proposed system to assist their
personnel in monitoring and reporting the pest attacks.

Fig. 1: Methodology used in designing the system

In Figure 2, the system begins with the Agronomists who

are the officers stationed at the paddy field. The officer will
capture the image of pest detected in the field area along with
the number of the insects. The agronomist then will evaluate
the risks of the plot and key in data using Android apps, then
these data will be send to the server. The server will deliver
the information into a database for the admin to review and
publish the notification to the farmers. The notification sent to
the farmers consists of the level of infestation, the amount of
insect, species and suggested procedures to handle the
infestation.
Figure 3 shows how the system works. The information
recorded from the paddy plot will be evaluated by the
Fig. 3: System flow-chart
B. Application Design
The system design is created and documented at this stage.
The use-case sequence diagram and a class diagram are used
for the design. Figure 4 and 5 show examples of the use-case
diagrams created for the system.
Figure 4 shows functional requirements for the admin to
manage the website. First, the admin need to login into the
system. Next, the admin can view the report sent by the
 Proc. of the 2018 IEEE 5th International Conference on Smart Instrumentation, Measurement and Applications (ICSIMA 2018)
28-30 November 2018, Songkhla, Thailand
agronomist. The admin also can add new agronomist to access
the apps.

Table 1 Use Case Description for Manage Report

Use Case Name Manage Report
Purpose To enable the admin to manage report.
Role Admin
1. The admin clicks the ‘Laporan Perosak’ link.
2. The admin can search by insects’ name or date of
Base report
Scenario 3. The admin hit enter. The report results by default
will view all the report available.
4. The admin can delete the report.
Fig. 4: Functional Requirements for Web Application Admin can search the report with filtering by date or
Alternative
name of the insects.
The functional requirement for the Android apps are when Scenario
the agronomist inserts the data and send the information to the
server. In this process, the system also sends notification to the Exception
farmer through email. The information will then be sent to the Scenario None
website for the admin to monitor. Figure 5 shows the
functional requirements for the Android application which
involve the farmer and agronomist. C. Database Design

At this stage, the database of the system is designed and

created where all the relationships are defined. The database is
created using MySQL. Figure 7 shows the relationship of the
database and the system database.

Fig.5: Functional Requirements for Android Application

Fig. 7: Entity Relationship Diagram and the System Database

Figure 6 shows the use case diagram for Manage Report
and Table 1 describes the procedure of managing the report. D. Application Development

The Android application is developed using Android Studio.

In Android Studio, the interface is called as an activity and is
designed using XML language. Before creating the system
Manage Report
interface with XML, the layout of the interface is drafted and
visualized by using a web app called Moqups [9].
Figure 8 (left) shows the main page interface design created
using Moqups, while Figure 8 (right) shows the main menu of
Fig. 6: Use Case Diagram for Admin to manage report the Android Application created using XML.
‘
 Proc. of the 2018 IEEE 5th International Conference on Smart Instrumentation, Measurement and Applications (ICSIMA 2018)
Fig. 8 Screenshot of the interface design for Android Apps
Figure 9 shows the main page interface design of the system
and Figure 10 shows the main page of the website.
Fig.9: Login Interface of the website
Fig.10 The main page of the website
28-30 November 2018, Songkhla, Thailand
Fig.11 Reporting Form on the Android Apps
Application development includes establishing connection
with the server. In order to test this connection, the simulated
data are used for the pest attack report. As shown in Figure 11
and Figure 12, the data are successfully recorded in the system
database and can be viewed on the website.
Fig. 12 Screenshot of Officer Report taken from the created website
Once the report is created, the system administrator will
evaluate, assess the risk of the pest attacks and send the
notification along with alert message to the farmers through
email as shown in Figure 13. The list of suggested actions or
procedure can be viewed from the website as in Figure 14.
Besides an email notification, the system also displays the
area of the pest attacks on the map. In this paper, the work in
[10] is integrated with the system for the visualization on the
map of the pests infected area. The map can be seen in Figure
15. The color of a point in the map differentiates the level of
the pest attacks.
 Proc. of the 2018 IEEE 5th International Conference on Smart Instrumentation, Measurement and Applications (ICSIMA 2018)
Fig. 13 Notification email to the farmer
Fig. 14 List of suggested action available on the system
Fig.15 ArcGIS map showing affected area
IV. TESTING & RESULTS
This section presents the system testing stage in order to
validate the system functionality. The test had been performed
on both the Android Apps and the website. The compatibility
test also been done for the developed Android application API
(application programming interface). This test is to ensure
compatibility of the Android Apps on different version of
androids.
28-30 November 2018, Songkhla, Thailand
For functionality test, black-box testing has been applied.
In total 11 test cases had been done for both Android Apps
and the web-based application. The test cases focused on the
items to be tested, where every possible input needs to be
examined to find out its expected output. From the results of
the test cases, it can be concluded that both Android Apps and
the website run successfully.
For the Android version compatibility test, the Android
Apps is able to meet the target range compatibility.
V. CONCLUSION
The pest infestation early warning system offers an
alternative in enhancing and improving the manual system
currently used by Agriculture Department in Kuala Selangor.
The system was developed by integrating Android Apps and
Web-based system. The system able to detect and record pest
attacks and these data are used by agronomists to measure
how severe the attack is. The agronomists will alert the
farmers to do necessary actions. In order to monitor the pest
attacks, the agriculture department recommends to use the
proposed system.
For further development, the system will integrate
automatic pest detection to detect the type and amount of pests
that attack the paddy field automatically, further ease the
farmers’ jobs.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This research is supported by Universiti Kuala Lumpur Short
Term Research Grant. The author would like to thank to
IADA Kuala Selangor for the information and support
provided for this work.
REFERENCES
[1] Sung, C. T. (2011). Will Malaysia achieve 100% self-sufficiency in rice
by 2015? Retrieved from EXTRAORDINARY MINDS DISCUSS
IDEAS: http://christopherteh.com/blog/2010/07/will-malaysia-achieve-
100-self-sufficiency-in-rice-by-2015/
[2] Ooi, P. A.-C. (2010). Rice Plant Hopper Outbreaks: A Man-Made
Plague? PANAP RICE Sheets, 12.
[3] Sharma, S. (2009). Mobile Sensing for Agriculture Activities Detection.
Journal of Agriculture Technology.
[4] Ms Rachana P.Koli, M. D. (2014). Android Application Agriculture
Decision Support System. Int. Journal of Engineering Research
Applications, 63-66.
[5] Dominic. (2010, November 15). Natural Disaster Monitor. Retrieved
from Android
[6] WSI. (2008). Stormtracker 2.8.3. Android 2.3.3.
[7] Chen, X., Luo, Q., Jiang, Y., Lv, Z., & Wu, S. (2008). A WebGIS
Expert System for Rice Brown Planthopper Disaster Early-Warning in
China's Shanghai. Bioinformatics and Biomedical Engineering, 2485-
2488.
[8] Moorhead, C. T. (2007). Early Detection and Distribution
MappingSystem for the Southeast Exotic Pest Plant Council
[9] Online Mockup, Wireframe & UI Prototyping Tool
https://moqups.com/#features
[10] Adidah Lajis, Haidawati Mohd Nasir and Norfarahin Ismail, 2016 Web
GIS based Information Visualization for Pest Infection: A Case Study of
Rice Plantation. Asian Journal of Plant Sciences, 15: 109-114