Abstract:
Agriculture is one of the major industries in Sri Lankan economy. However,
the farmers in Sri Lanka face many problems with respect to information
delivery from agricultural experts to rural farmers. There is no proper
mechanism to obtain the agricultural information for their farming
activities. One of the main issues they faced is lack of available information
on identification of diseases/pests and treatments for them. Nowadays, we
can see that most of the farmers are using smart phones and also few
mobile-based applications are available for some aspects of agriculture, for
example, to view and receive market prices and news in agriculture. In this
study, we have proposed an android based disease identification system to
help farmers as well as Agriculture Instructors (AIs). Through this system,
farmers can identify the disease or pest attack in their farm and also suitable
control methods and its usage based on the disease/pest. The interfaces of
the mobile-based application are designed by considering the user friendliness of its interfaces. The developed prototype system is validated
internally using sample data and also checked the user satisfaction by
getting the feedbacks from domain experts. The system was refined based
on the feedbacks. This application is now available in English language and
we have planned to develop it in Sinhala and Tamil languages in future.
