Smart phone, smart gadget, healthy food

Portable, in the Field Gadget, for Healthy Plants & Spot Disease

Source:  North Caroline State University new tech for plant health

First of its Kind Device to Detect Plant Disease in Minutes

A new, smartphone powered device detects disease in plants.  For the first time, plant disease can be detected by a portable device, used by a farmer in the field and the analysis is done on the spot within minutes.  Up until now, plant analysis had to be done in a lab and that could take days or weeks.  This smartphone powered device reads gas concentrations in a plant in the farm field real-time. That analysis tells farmers that they are dealing with the presence of disease in plants and that they should take action.

Portable, Down on the Farm Device

This significant innovation was developed by a team at North Carolina State University.  The device is designed to attach to a farmer's smart phone above the phone's camera for quick crop analysis.  This real-time turnaround is  important to detect plant disease in order to limit the spread of it and the crop damage from it.

Significant New Innovation For the Quality of Food

It is known that diseased plants emit volatile organic compounds (VOC).  A sample leaf from a suspected plant is put into a sealed test tube for 15 minutes, allowing it to release any VOC.  The system uses a paper test strip that changes color if there's a VOC problem.  The smartphone camera images the color changes for the farmer to interpret. The process takes just a few minutes.  But, the North Carolina team is now developing an app to make the results and evaluation automatic.