Health status of cows can now be transmitted via wifi

An Austrian startup, SmaXtec, is placing connected sensors in cows’ stomachs to transmit health data via wifi.

The sensors, which are the size of a hot dog, track minute-by-minute data about the temperature of the cow, the pH of her stomach, movement, and activity, and they identify when the animal is in heat.

With 95 percent accuracy, the device can determine if a cow is pregnant.

Read also: You can now listen to your unborn child’s heartbeat with a Bellabeat’s Shell

When changes are monitored, the farm staff receives a text update.

The device, which has roughly four years of battery life, is inserted into the first of four stomachs through a cow’s throat using a metal rod and lodges in the rumen, Bloomberg reports.

It can be hard for humans to tell a cow is ill until there are visible signs of sickness, but the sensors can pick up and report changes even before there are physical symptoms.

“It’s easier, after all, to look at the situation from inside the cow than in the lab,” SmaXtec co-founder Stefan Rosenkranz told Bloomberg.

RipplesNigeria …without borders, without fears

Join the conversation

Opinions

Support Ripples Nigeria, hold up solutions journalism

Balanced, fearless journalism driven by data comes at huge financial costs.

As a media platform, we hold leadership accountable and will not trade the right to press freedom and free speech for a piece of cake.

If you like what we do, and are ready to uphold solutions journalism, kindly donate to the Ripples Nigeria cause.

Your support would help to ensure that citizens and institutions continue to have free access to credible and reliable information for societal development.

Donate Now