Associate professor Jean Anne Incorvia and her team have developed a graphene "tattoo" that can be stuck directly onto a leaf to provide real-time moisture readings. The researchers also believe it has the potential to be a building block for a new kind of plant monitoring, by turning the patches into a neural network that computes on the plants themselves.
"Not only are we just sensing the moisture level, but we can have that sensor act as this artificial synapse, which then we can put into a neural network," says Jean Anne Incorvia, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at The University of Texas at Austin.
Incorvia and colleagues (including co-author Deji Akinwande and graduate student Utkarsh Misra) published this research, Graphene In-Sensor Compute Device for Plant Hydration Monitoring, in Nano Letters in February 2026.