Chatbot app cuts pesticide safety checks from 22 minutes to 3
Crop Improvement
If you've ever wondered what actually happens to the person spraying the herbicide on the sugarcane in your sugar bowl, this study found 85% of farmers spray alone without protective routines and most don't read the label first.
Scientists in Thailand built a phone app with a chat-based assistant to quickly check whether sugarcane and rice farmers are handling pesticides safely, replacing a slow paper questionnaire. When they tested it on 125 farmers, they found most weren't following basic safety steps, like reading warning labels or washing hands before eating, and nearly three-quarters had already experienced symptoms like dizziness or stomach pain. The app itself worked well and was much faster than paper forms, so it could help health workers catch problems earlier.
Key Findings
85.6% of farmers self-sprayed herbicides without help, 82.4% didn't read pesticide labels, and 81.6% skipped hand-washing before meals
74.6% of farmers reported pesticide-related health symptoms (mostly moderate severity), with dizziness, nausea, and abdominal pain most common
The app cut assessment and reporting time from 22.6 minutes (paper-based) to 3.2 minutes (p<0.001), while overall risk classification found 38.9% of farmers at high risk and only 7.9% at low risk
chevron_right Technical Summary
Researchers built a smartphone app with a chatbot to help Thai rice and sugarcane farmers check their pesticide exposure risk, cutting assessment time from 22.6 minutes to just 3.2 minutes and revealing that nearly 4 in 10 farmers face high health risk from unsafe spraying habits.
Abstract Preview
Original paper
Development and evaluation of an application-based system with LINE chatbot for pesticide-exposure risk assessment among sugarcane farmers
This study developed and evaluated a mobile application integrated with a LINE chatbot for assessing pesticide-use behaviors and related health risks among rice and sugarcane farmers in Thailand. A...
open_in_new Read full abstractAbstract copyright held by the original publisher.
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