A plant-friendly wearable sensor for reducing interfacial abiotic stress effects and growth monitoring

Abstract

Newly developed flexible plant wearable devices have recently been regarded as a promising smart strategy for monitoring plant physiological signals in forestry genetics and breeding. However, the interfacial contact between the plant and the device can interfere with the normal physiological functions of the plant and easily induce abiotic stress effects, affecting plant growth and detection results. Here, we develop a simple, scalable, and respiratory plant-friendly wearable (PW) sensor that can effectively mitigate abiotic stresses and significantly reduce potential damage to plants. Notably, the frog foot inspired structure has a transparent, stretchable hexagonal prism array structure that provides four azimuthal escape routes for water vapor and high transparency (92%) with little obstruction to light. The results show that the PW sensor significantly ameliorates the effects of compound abiotic stress caused by flooding and light exposure and achieves stress levels comparable to those of the conventional hydrogel wearable device within a delay of about 2 weeks. Meanwhile, by utilizing the dual network structure formed by cross-linking between the materials, the PW sensor has excellent sensitivity to a wide range of ambient temperature (30–100 °C) and humidity (30–100% RH) variations. In addition, we have designed a wireless monitoring system to facilitate real-time remote monitoring of plant growth microenvironments. This work is expected to establish an innovative perspective for plant-friendly wearable interfaces, thereby expanding the application scope of flexible plant-friendly wearables.