  Smart agriculture is an evolving trend in agriculture industry, where sensors
are embedded into plants to collect vital data and help in decision making to
ensure higher quality of crops and prevent pests, disease, and other possible
threats. In Saudi Arabia, growing palms is the most important agricultural
activity, and there is an increasing need to leverage smart agriculture
technology to improve the production of dates and prevent diseases. One of the
most critical diseases of palms if the red palm weevil, which is an insect that
causes a lot of damage to palm trees and can devast large areas of palm trees.
The most challenging problem is that the effect of the weevil is not visible by
humans until the palm reaches an advanced infestation state. For this reason,
there is a need to use advanced technology for early detection and prevention
of infestation propagation. In this project, we have developed am IoT based
smart palm monitoring prototype as a proof-of-concept that (1) allows to
monitor palms remotely using smart agriculture sensors, (2) contribute to the
early detection of red palm weevil. Users can use web/mobile application to
interact with their palm farms and help them in getting early detection of
possible infestations. We used Elm company IoT platform to interface between
the sensor layer and the user layer. In addition, we have collected data using
accelerometer sensors and we applied signal processing and statistical
techniques to analyze collected data and determine a fingerprint of the
infestation.
