Internet of Things experimental platform for real-time water monitoring: a case study of the Ararangua River estuary

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a technology that can be employed to monitor several sectors, mostly precision agriculture, where environmental data can be used to better manage resources, reduce costs, and improve the use of natural resources. This work proposes the application of cloud-based IoT for monitoring irrigation water in rice fields. Southern Brazil was chosen as a case study because it suffers from water pollution problems due to urban activities, coal mining, and the inflow of saline water into the Ararangua River estuary. All these factors can compromise the water quality for irrigation. The presence of salt in irrigation water can compromise rice growth, making its monitoring essential for successful cultivation. Currently, the rice farmer needs to travel to the riverbank to assess the water quality using a manual sensor. This procedure demands time and resources and is not always efficient. The technology helps indicate whether the water is of quality to irrigate crops, helping the farmers decide whether to use that water to irrigate their fields. The solution is based on low-cost wireless sensor network devices, with subsequent transmission of data from the gateway using the network mobile phone cloud. Data collected were also accessed by the smartphone through a mobile application. This system was implemented for testing in the Ararangua River estuary, southern Santa Catarina, Brazil. Also, it appears as an option for farmers who need to monitor the quality of the water channel of the crop, thus avoiding the loss and reduction in crop productivity because the system can be continuously monitored and show notifications to the user. The highlights of this work were prototyping a complete solution to help the farmer using a smartphone application.