Flora Monitoring with a Plant-Microbial Fuel Cell

Plant-Microbial Fuel Cells are a promising technology as energy supplier for many different applications in precision agriculture and environmental monitoring. In this article, we discuss and analyze the possibility to use it also a small scale biosensor to monitor a plant health and report information with an embedded wireless sensor node. We present a prototype that exploits the electric energy generated by bacteria to power the embedded electronics and some sensors, while the rate of energy generation is used as a feedback on plant’s health state.