A Web-Based IoT Monitoring and Service System for Agricultural Applications

Many agriculture industries in Malaysia are small and have a low adoption level of modern information technologies and automation, which restricts data analysis and its use. The traditional data collection method implemented in current farming practices is hardly integrated, and the data could not be analyzed promptly. This research presents an integrated approach to track and trace overall agricultural production through a web-based IoT monitoring application. Two experiment setups were conducted in this work. One is a customized-developed IoT system prototype at the Tenth College (K10) of Universiti Putra Malaysia, and another is an IoT-equipped weather station at the College of Bioresources, National Ilan University Taiwan. The data collected from these two study areas were displayed in a web dashboard with interactive functions using a Python web analytics framework called Dash. It visualizes the collected real-time environmental data through the Dash platform, including humidity, temperature, soil moisture content, wind rate, and rainfall parameters. The web dashboard can be updated dynamically and loaded onto any type of web server. The web applications showed an average overall performance score in Google PageSpeed Insights and Google Lighthouse in terms of speed, connectivity, and accessibility. The statistical analysis of the T-test showed no significant difference (P > 0.05) in performance for the web applications developed for both IoT systems.