Sprouty Offers Assistance To Harried Household Plant Owners

Posted on Tuesday, December 7th, 2021

Got plants? Then chances are there’s a fern or an African violet you’ve been neglecting in a back bedroom that will expire soon if it doesn’t get water.

You’re a busy person. You don’t always remember these things in the face of all your other work and home tasks. You need Sprouty.

Sprouty is a web-based application Cameron Carley and his team of fellow Algonquin College students will debut Friday at the virtual RE/ACTION Showcase. RE/ACTION draws together students, educators and local professionals in a forum devoted to new research and innovative projects.

Carley describes the Sprouty prototype as his final “passion project” before he graduates in January from the Computer Engineering Technology – Computer Science program.

“I feel very lucky to have the chance to pursue it,” he says. “I love plants, my mom was an avid gardener. I recently bought a house and I need plants in it to make it feel like home. But I have so much going on in my life right now and I have a limited attention span for certain real-world applications like watering.”

Hence the need for an app that would provide timely advice about watering the houseplants. Carley knows he isn’t the only one who neglects them. Households everywhere are filled with stressed ferns or violets that experience an early demise because someone didn’t attend to their needs in time. Carley and his fiancé spent months nurturing a pot of herbs that turned to dust in hardly more than a day when they were put out in the sun too long without water.

“I was seeing these real-life scenarios all over where people I know, people I love or myself were having issues with keeping their plants healthy. My project was coming up and when the initial plan fell through, I whipped up a PowerPoint and put something together in Photoshop, and my professor liked it enough that it gave me and my group the greenlight.

The work was divided between Carley and his teammates Milena Seebaluck, Stephanie Cameron, Jonathan Wenek and Haotian Li. Two people worked on developing the website; one person concentrated on the middleware – the element involved in sending out email notifications that it’s time to water this or that plant. Two worked on the back end where data is sorted and determines how the user interacts with the data.

Carley praises his colleagues for the skill and determination they brought to the project over its four-month development period. “I don’t think the final result would have been possible without them. I respect them completely, and they kept me motivated throughout the complex process. The chance to work with understanding individuals, bounce ideas off each other and create this application is just awesome.”

Sprouty is a location-based system that can highlight 15 common houseplants plants in different rooms with individual watering needs. Can’t remember which plant is which? Each can be identified with a photo. At present, he says the only non-intuitive part of the app is that users have to look up information about those needs themselves. He notes ruefully that there was only so much the could accomplish with limited resources and a short development period.

With more time, he envisions that Sprouty could become so much more: for instance, a mobile app in which users could type the name of any garden plant and its scientific name and water needs would be highlighted. Emails would be replaced by push notifications. Sprouty could also be developed as a resource for community garden groups, where individual participants would be able to determine on any given day what part of the garden needed water – or where pest control was required or fertilizer.

“I would love to take it further,” Carley says, “and a community-based app that functions as a mobile to-do list and comments board seems like something that would be incredibly useful. But these things take resources I don’t have and time. At the end of my final semester, with other deliverables popping up, and an awesome job offer for January, time is something I’m short on right now.

“But I will be actively developing on it post-graduation. How quickly things get developed is another issue, but I will be working on it.”

To learn more about Sprouty, register for Friday’s RE/ACTION Showcase here.

 


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