Supporting Participatory Learning in Urban Agriculture with Wireless Sensing and VR

Using wireless sensing and virtual reality (VR) technologies to address urban farming across New York City and developing a novel inexpensive and low-power Radio Frequency (RF)-based wireless sensor that can determine soil metal concentration in large areas without land disturbance.

Urban agriculture has the potential to help meet the growing demands for locally produced, low-carbon-footprint, affordable produce for urban residents. However, there are numerous obstacles that urban farmers face. These include dealing with degraded or contaminated soils, lack of land access and lack of awareness and social networking opportunities with other farmers. This project addresses these challenges, by creating a set of tools for participatory sensing in urban agriculture, and a virtual reality (VR) platform for sharing data.

This project is also developing a low-cost sensor that can map the soil metal concentration across different communities and assist them in remedial actions, with a model for participatory research and remediation that can be shared with environmental justice communities worldwide.