1574
(Invited) Plant Wearable for Enhanced Agricultural Productivity

Wednesday, 16 May 2018: 14:30
Room 214 (Washington State Convention Center)
J. M. Nassar, S. M. Khan, M. Nour, A. Almuslem, and M. M. Hussain (KAUST)
With increased global population, it is important to ensure their basic need: food. While eighty percent of the world's population depend on five agricultural products: rice, wheat, corn, barley, sugar cane, only in 20% areas they can be grown. Often, due to uncertain climatic condition, soil condition, excessive rain, and other natural uncertainties, the agricultural productivity is compromised and often not optimally controlled. Although, with digitization, this unfortunate situation is changing, due to high price, need for constant seamless connectivity and precision and fast data analytics, such digitization is not proliferating at the rate it is required. Finally, naturally most plants have different "skins", shapes, sizes and sensitivities. Here we show, low-cost, standalone, seamlessly connected plant wearable which can conform to sensitive plant sides and can monitor the surrounding micro-climate and plants botanical condition. We use heterogeneous integration of hybrid materials, devices and processes to achieve such ultra-light weight and low-cost disposable systems which potentially change our perspective about traditional ICs and their integration in our daily life.