Smart agriculture: Blending IoT sensor data with visual analytics

Mike Prorock offers an overview of mesur.io, a game-changing climate awareness solution that combines smart sensor technology, data transmission, and state-of-the-art visual analytics to transform the agricultural and turf management market. Mesur.io enables growers to monitor areas of concern, providing immediate benefits to crop yield, supply costs, farm labor overhead, and water consumption.

Mike Prorock offers an overview of mesur.io, a game-changing climate awareness solution that combines smart sensor technology, data transmission, and state-of-the-art visual analytics to transform the agricultural and turf management market. Utilizing real-time, in-place measurements, with advanced big data analytics and relevant external data, mesur.io enables growers to monitor areas of concern, from water usage to feed storage conditions and beyond, providing immediate benefits to crop yield, supply costs, farm labor overhead, and water consumption. The mesur.io hardware sensor component, the io Bulb, measures temperature, moisture level, relative humidity, light levels, and conductivity. Each io Bulb sensor is configurable but typically sends eight data points per reporting cycle. These numbers are for the base configuration bulbs only. Obviously, as more sensors are attached (e.g., CO2 measurements or additional temp points), the numbers grow. Mesur.io’s platform uses AWS cloud solutions so users can focus resources on the devices and on the user experience of the platform rather than on infrastructure and traditional systems and operations management. Hive simplifies the storage of IoT data for analysis via Apache Spark, particularly when combining that data with other key datasets that inform regular analysis (water usage trends, problem alerting, etc.). Hive can also simplify access to the data with rapid data development platforms such as Qlik Sense, which enables mesur.io to effectively merge the results of big data analytics from Apache Spark and external sources with historical in-memory analysis of sensor data and real-time feeds of data from devices. Mesur.io brings simplicity and reliability to the currently complex and underserved agriculture tech market. Breaking the trend of single purpose devices that require private networks, locked-in ecosystems, and/or the costly manual reading of inaccurate devices, mesur.io leverages state-of-the-art sensors, 3D printing technology, patent-pending data transmission, big data analytics, and cloud computing to deliver a game-changing solution.