Investigating educationally fruitful speech-based methods to assist people with special needs to care potted plants

Abstract

For elderly or people with special needs, caring plants is a good practice to reinforce an optimistic aspect of view. Unfortunately, similar tasks often require physical strength and senses to work fine. This paper reports exactly on the effort of students of Agricultural Engineering to bridge this gap, through the exploitation of innovative hardware along with speech and voice recognition techniques. Into this context, the paper describes methods to combine speech- based applications, relying on either cloud or local services, with smart phones and similar innovative systems, ranging from arduino to raspberry pi ones, to trigger plant caring actions or to query the values of several plant-related parameters. Plants are converted into speaking entities. The derived software and hardware configurations are evaluated. Furthermore, students “demystify” the potential of the recently appeared “exotic” devices and techniques that have been introduced in the modern agriculture.