An IoT-Based Real-Time Intelligent Monitoring and Notification System of Cold Storage

The intake of the perishable fruits and vegetables (FVs) in the human diet can contribute to reduce the risk of some chronic diseases. But unfortunately, FVs loss rate is high among all the food produced annually and occurs at storage stage of post-harvest life cycle. One of the key factors contributing to this high loss rate is inability to gauge vital ambient environmental parameters in cold storage. The existing monitoring solutions about cold storage are limited to only gauge temperature, relative humidity and ignore other vital ambient environmental parameters such as luminosity and concentration of gases. This is a critical issue that needs to be addressed to overcome the loss rate of FVs. This paper presents a real-time intelligent monitoring and notification system (RT-IMNS) banked on an Internet of Things (IoT)-enabled approach for real-time monitoring of temperature, relative humidity, luminosity and concentration of gas in cold storage and notifies the personnel on exceeding of dangerous limits of these parameters. Moreover, decision support is implemented in the RT-IMNS using Artificial Neural Network (ANN) with forward propagation to classify the status of commodity into one of three classes i.e. good, unsatisfactory or alarming. The proposed prediction model outperforms Compress Sending (CS), Adaptive Naïve Bayes (ANB), Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) and Data Mining (DM) with respect to forecasting accuracy. We achieved 99% accuracy using forward propagation neural network model while existing models such as CS, ANB, XGBoost, DM achieved 95.60%, 87.50%, 93.59%, 90% accuracy respectively. Moreover, proposed approach achieved 100% precision, 100% recall, 100% F1-score for good class is achieved, for unsatisfactory class precision is 98%, recall is 99%, F1-score is 98% and for alarming class precision is 100%, recall is 98% and F1-score is 99%.