A Smart Plant Pot for Augmenting Human-Plant Touch Interactions through Vibrotactile Feedback

Abstract

In the field of horticultural therapy, which utilizes gardening activities as a means of therapy, positive psychological and physiological effects of physical contact with plants have been reported. However, especially for urban people, opportunities and motivation for regular contact with plants are limited even if indoor plants are installed at home, school, or office. This paper presents a smart plant pot that detects user touch on the plant and imparts kinetic energy to the plant to provide vibrotactile feedback to the user. The experiments demonstrated that the vibrotactile stimuli generated via waves propagated from the plant are perceptible to users who make contact with the plant while the implemented capacitive sensing technique detects human touch with less than 25-ms delay. We also propose some examples of augmented human-plant interactions using the developed pot to facilitate the positive effects, where a plant appears to voluntarily react to human touch by moving its body.