Plants can now ask for water by sending tweets

Raipur: “Oh God, so hot! Someone please fetch me water,” tweets a jasmine plant. “It is too humid to survive”, tweets a sandalwood tree.

Hold your breath. This is not a cartoon show, but the real expressions of ‘plants in distress’ tweeted through “Gabby Tree”, a device invented by a budding scientist of an engineering college here.

Adity Om, third year student of National Institute of Technology (NIT), Raipur, has developed the device that makes the plants and tree speak by tweeting to ask for succour if they find themselves in hostile environment such as high humid and hot conditions and threat from fire.

“My invention decodes plants language to human language”, said Adity, whose discovery, has been awarded third best innovation, at the ‘Intel India Innovation Conclave, 2014’, held at Bengaluru on December 12. It also received ‘The Jury Popular Choice’ award for 2014 carrying a  Rs 1 lakh reward.

The device is a sensor system which, when attached to a tree or a plant, enables them to tweet on social networking site such as Twitter and send text ‘push messages’ to the person operating the system in real time.

“Twelve different kinds of sensors, measuring different environmental parameters such a humidity, temperature, etc... have been interfaced with the intel development board called Intel Galileo, a tool for prototyping simple interactive designs”, the engineering  student said.