Wearable technology is great, obviously, but until now it has lacked a certain bovine component.
The University of Calgary – and in particular veterinary epidemiologist Karin Orsel – have obviously been thinking the same way: LaboratoryEquipment.com reports that Orsel has been testing how accelerometers – the same devices that monitor activity levels inside human fitness monitors – can be used to detect disease in beef cattle.
Orsel and team fitted accelerometers to ID tags in the ears of 18 cows, using the information collected to work out how much times the cows were spending eating, chewing the cud and walking around.
The idea is that by analysing changes in cow activity, observers will be able to identify illnesses like bovine respiratory disease at an early stage.
Sadly / happily, Orsel’s experiment was marred by a very robust set of cows, who hardly got sick during the test period.
“That was unfortunate for us but fortunate for the cows, I guess,” Orsel, whose team published the result in the May issue of the Journal of Animal Science, told LaboratoryEquipment.com.