Plant Health Evaluation Based on Bioimpedance Phase Measurement

Abstract

Crop diseases and pest infestation are one of the main causes of economic losses in the agriculture business and reduction in food production. In this context, the application of techniques for early diagnosis of crop health has been widely reported in recent literature and Electrical Impedance Spectroscopy (EIS) has been shown as a powerful tool. However, despite the EIS is the technique with the greatest potential to detect stresses in the initial stage, there are two main limitations that hinder the application of this technique: the sensitivity to environmental factors and the difficulty in classifying different types of stress. So, in this paper we propose a simple way of detecting plant stress through EIS from the analysis of the electrical model of plant tissue, measuring only one parameter (phase) of the bioimpedance. The results show that is possible to use single information, the phase change, and a particular range or even a fixed frequency, instead of dealing with a wide frequency range and several types of measurements simultaneously.