Farm Operation Monitoring System with Wearable Sensor Devices Including RFID

To increase agricultural productivity and promote efficient management in modern agriculture, it is important to monitor the field environment, crop conditions, and farming operations instead of simply relying on farmers’ experiences and senses. However, it is difficult to realize such monitoring automatically and precisely, because agricultural fields are widely spaced and have few infrastructures, monitoring targets vary according to crop selection and other variables, and many operations are performed flexibly by manual labor. One approach to monitoring in open fields under harsh conditions is to use a sensor network (Akyildiz et al., 2002; Delin & Jackson, 2000; Kahn et al., 1999) of many sensor nodes comprised of small sensor units with radio data links. In our previous study, we developed a sensor network for agricultural use called a Field Server (Fukatsu & Hirafuji, 2005, Fukatsu et al., 2006, Fukatsu et al., 2009a) that enables effective crop and environment monitoring by equipped sensors and autonomous management. Monitoring with Field Servers facilitates growth diagnosis and risk aversion by cooperating with some agricultural applications such as crop growing simulations, maturity evaluations, and pest occurrence predictions (Duthie, 1997; Iwaya & Yamamoto, 2005; Sugiura & Honjo, 1997; Zhang, et al., 2002). However, it is insufficient for obtaining detailed information about farming operations, because these operations are performed flexibly in every nook and cranny depending on crop and environment conditions. Several approaches have been used to monitor farming operations, including writing notes manually, using agricultural equipment with an automatic recording function, and monitoring operations with information technology (IT)-based tools. Keeping a farming diary is a common method, but it is troublesome to farmers and inefficient to share or use their hand-lettered information. Some facilities and machinery can be appended to have an automatic recording function, but it requires considerable effort and cost to make these improvements. Moreover, it is difficult to obtain information about manual tasks, which are important in small-scale farming to realize precision farming and to perform delicate operations such as fruit picking. Several researchers have developed data-input systems that involve farmers using cellphones or PDAs while working to reduce farmers’ effort of recording their operations (Bange et al., 2004; Otuka & Sugawara, 2003; Szilagyi et al., 2005; Yokoyama, 2005; Zazueta