Improved Fuzzy Rule Promotion-Based Localized Crop Knowledge Dissemination System for Farmers of Punjab (India) Using Mobile Phone Technology

ABSTRACT

Indian economy includes the major contribution provided by agriculturally driven activities. There is need to provide the agricultural stakeholders an appropriate, reliable, local, fast, ‘round-the-clock, and precise knowledge, possibly in their native language, in order that they can enhance their decision-making capacity to improve the agricultural productivity. This can be achieved by using mobile phones. Mobile phones are becoming part of the daily routine of farmers and can be used to disseminate this appropriate, multilingual, localized knowledge right at the location of use. In this article, an improved fuzzy rule promotion-based technique to infer advice to farmers has been presented. Using this technique, an Android-based mobile phone application named mAgIDS has been developed. This application uses a Global Positioning System (GPS) for localized inference and local language selected by the user. The application was tested on the dataset of a disease diagnosis of a paddy crop. The chi-square (χ²) test was used to match the result of the mAgIDS system with the experts’ inferences. It was found that the results of the system and experts match with an accuracy of 95.84% at a 5% level of significance. Twenty-two scientists, working at various locations within Punjab state in India, were contacted for validation of the system, with 15 relevant parameters. It was found that the proposed system is statistically valid. The real-time implementation of the system provides immense and timely help to the farmers in making appropriate decisions for their crop production.

KEYWORDS:

• Agricultural knowledge dissemination system
• fuzzy rule promotion method
• localized system
• mobile phone application

Acknowledgment

The authors acknowledge the support provided by the various agricultural scientists at the Punjab Agricultural University, Ludhiana, Punjab, India main campus and its Regional Research Stations/Krishi Vigyan Kenders at various locations within Punjab State, India.

Notes

¹An initiative of TATA Innovation Lab (http://www.tata.in/innovation/articlesinside/TCS-innovation-labs).