A Smart AIoT-Based Mobile Application for Plant Disease Detection and Environment Management in Small-Scale Farms Using MobileViT

Small-scale farms produce more than one-third of the world’s food supply, making them a crucial contributor to global food security. In this study, an artificial intelligence of things (AIoT) framework is introduced for smart small-scale farm management. For plant disease detection, the lightweight MobileViT model, which integrates vision transformer and convolutional modules, was utilized to efficiently capture both global and local image features. Data augmentation and transfer learning were employed to enhance the model’s overall performance. MobileViT resulted in a test accuracy of 99.5%, with per-class precision, recall, and f1-score ranging between 0.92 and 1.00 considering the benchmark Plant Village dataset (14 species–38 classes). MobileViT was shown to outperform several standard deep convolutional networks, including MobileNet, ResNet and Inception, by 2–12%. Additionally, an LLM-powered interactive chatbot was integrated to provide farmers with instant plant care suggestions. For plant environment management, the powerful, cost-effective ESP32 microcontroller was utilized as the core processing unit responsible for collecting sensor data (e.g., soil moisture), controlling actuators (e.g., water pump for irrigation), and maintaining connectivity with Google Firebase Cloud. Finally, a mobile application was developed to integrate the AI and IoT system capabilities, hence providing users with a reliable platform for smart plant disease detection and environment management. Each system component was each tested individually, before being incorporated into the mobile application and tested in real-world scenarios. The presented AIoT-based solution has the potential to enhance crop productivity within small-scale farms while promoting sustainable farming practices and efficient resource management.