Development of an Android Mobile App for Real Time Maize Stem Borers Monitoring in Precision Farming

Abstract

Development of an Android mobile app for real time maize stem borers’ monitoring in precision agriculture is presented. In farmland, cultivated maize requires farmers’ constant care and monitoring during the developing stage to avoid sudden attack of insect pests such as stem borers in the field. The maize monitoring process taken by farmers to ensure attack free and healthy growth is very strenuous and time consuming. The sudden invasion of the Spodoptera species (stem borers) to maize farm early 2016 caused huge loss to farmers and imposed food scarcity in the land. These species are hardly distinguished from one another by farmers in the farm because they look alike in appearance. Rural farmers do not know the right insecticides to apply for the effective control of these species. These issues kept on lingering and now have become serious concern to farmers. Hence, this work is to bridge the gap by providing android mobile app that would enable farmers to effectively monitor these species remotely. The mobile app architecture consists of various sections such as captured insects, categories of spodoptera species, insect pest population plots, determination of economic injury level (EIL) and economic threshold (ET), and control measure was successfully designed. The mobile app structure and behavior were also designed using Unified Modeling Language (UML). The maize Stem borers App was developed in android studio using Kotlin programming language. The App is linked to the cloud server where all the captured and recognized species are stored for downloading and farmers’ visualization. The Internet of Things (IoT) hardware was setup in the maize farm which captured these targeted insect pests, processed via Nividia Jetson Nano and sent to the cloud server. The mobile App synchronized successfully with the cloud server and could download stored maize insect pests in the farmer’s Android phone.