UrbanVG: A Gamification Encouraging Urban Vegetable Garden Platform

Urban vegetable gardens are spaces in urban landscapes devoted to cultivating food by communities or individuals. It has several advantages to cities since it improves environmental awareness and can create social ties in communities, despite being a sustainable way to produce food. Its use can also take advantage of the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm, with several studies proposing the monitoring of urban gardens with humidity, luminosity, and temperature sensors. However, most of them focus on the automation of the cultivation. Differently, this paper aims to present a Web platform designed with gamification techniques to incentive urban garden development. The gamification is applied to encourage volunteer work through competitiveness among users and a reward system. Moreover, the system also enables disseminating information about plant cultivation by the users that receive experiences points based on its interaction. Moreover, the results show an experimental setup developed to validate the platform integration with ThingSpeak to allow users to follow their sensor data.