Opportunities and Challenges of Using Smart Mobile Apps in Irrigation of Agricultural Products

Farmers have traditionally used their sensory and perceptual systems to diagnose and monitor the health and needs of their crops. However, humans have five basic perceptual systems with varying degrees of accuracy that can vary from person to person and largely depend on stress, experience, health and age. To overcome this problem, in the last decade, with the advent of smart phone technology, new agricultural programs have been developed to achieve better, cost-effective, accurate and reliable detection systems. Conventional smartphones are equipped with several sensors that can be used to support normal and advanced agricultural activities in real time at a very low cost.Thus, the development of agricultural applications based on smartphones has increased exponentially in recent years. However, the great potential offered by smartphone applications has not yet been fully realized. Due to the fact that farm management and irrigation operations usually require a lot of time, therefore, human resources must perform tasks in a specific time. The use of smartphone software increases the quality of management and better use of inputs, as well as reducing time and manpower, and ultimately related costs. Therefore, the present article provides an overview and analysis of the features of several mobile applications for use in smart farming on the market or developed in various studies. This helps farmers to assess the type of available programs, their features and compare them. This article is also a good resource to help researchers and application developers understand the limitations of existing tools and gaps in new work.