Mobile Apps

The ongoing shift from desktop to mobile computing has brought new and exciting challenges for us to address with the development of mobile-based software that we can use to support our research goals within the Information and Computational Sciences Group.

We as a group are involved in the development of dedicated mobile applications for both the Android and iOS environments. Broadly speaking the Dundee site is involved predominately with Android development while Aberdeen focusses on iOS applications.

Mobile applications are an important and exciting platform which allows the use of commodity hardware to develop systems that give researchers working off-site access to large volumes of data held in a central location. The ability to remotely add data also has considerable advantages relating to data quality and provenance.

Our apps range from the analysis of soil based on colour and geographical position such as SOCiT to the development of interfaces to allow researchers to access our plant resource database Germinate while remote from the institute and remotely record information (audio, photography, geographic position and video based) in Germinate Mobile and the facility to use Bluetooth based bar code scanning in remote gathering of experimental data with the Germinate Scan system.

For more information on the mobile applications we have been developing click on the following links.

Buntata

Buntata (Gaelic for potato) is an Android application that allows users to visually identify disease in crops by using a series of images typical for a particular condition.

Germinate Scan

Germinate Scan is an Android application used to systematically record barcodes from the device’s internal camera or an external barcode scanner. The barcodes are associated with the time and location of recording and can be exported easily at any time. One area of application of Germinate Scan is the collection of field trials data. Field workers can use it to record phenotypes and associate them with specific plants.

SOCiT

The SOCiT app, developed for Apple and Android devices, is capable of providing an estimate of soil organic matter content using positional information and a photograph of the topsoil. While not as accurate as laboratory analysis, it can give a useful indication of soil OM content for land managers.