A mooving tail of cows, calves and the Internet of Things Internet of Things devices mounted on cows’ tails are responsible for 150,000 safe births of calves, if the developer and Vodafone are to be believed. Moocall, developers of a calving sensor which is linked to Vodafone’s M2M Internet of Things network, says that “more than 110,000 calves and around 50,000 cows die every year …
With a couple of exceptions (Nest, Alexi), IoT hasn't been marketed that hard by established companies (ones with a reputation to lose). I'm hardly swamped by advertisements for IoT gizmos (but maybe Google will only display adverts for security cameras and baby monitors if I search for 'nappies' and 'teething', which I don't). A lot of the really dodgy security is in the no-name cheap landfill kit - not sure how much is being sold; I don't see much of it about in the wild.
In time, genuinely useful items will be bought by more people, thus coming under greater scrutiny. Lessons learnt in industrial control will filter down to consumer kit. Health services, in an effort to make economies in caring for an ageing population, will look towards remote monitoring of vulnerable people's health to save on the time a community nurse spends travelling between homes.
Home automation has been around for years, but traditionally has been hard-wired into the house (drastically reducing attack surfaces) and expensive. It is the prevalence of now cheap wireless networking that means there are cheap wireless gizmos on the market that aren't as secure as they should be.
Well, at least people can be honest now. The mobile phone signal around here is shit.
Has anyone done any analysis about birth rate defects due to the calf growing up on a microwave transmitter, or will marketing just claim that they are helping to evolve a better cow for later introduction to the more powerful microwave oven ?
>Has anyone done any analysis about birth rate defects due to the calf growing up on a microwave transmitter, ... ?
If the health issues from RF radiation are fewer and less severe than health issues arising from an unsupervised births, then the net result is positive. Farmers are motivated to have a healthy herd - though now I'm thinking of Alan Partridges rant against farmers:
"You are a big posh sod with plums in your mouth, and the plums have mutated and they have got beaks. You make pigs smoke. You feed beef burgers to swans. You have big sheds, but nobody's allowed in. And in these sheds you have 20ft high chickens, and these chickens are scared because the don't know why they're so big, and they're going, "Oh why am I so massive?" and they're looking down at all the little chickens and they think they're in an aeroplane because all the other chickens are so small. Do you deny that? No, I think his silence speaks volumes."
"Has anyone done any analysis about birth rate defects due to the calf growing up on a microwave transmitter"
According to this the monitor is only fitted when calving's due in a few days.
http://www.examiner.co.uk/news/west-yorkshire-news/huddersfield-farmer-delivers-calf-after-12700086
A large increase in tail activity signifies either that the cow is about to produce a particularly firm cowpat or that it is calving.
I wonder if they report the monitor the production cowpats as well - location, frequency, time to produce... to monitor the cows intestinal health.
>I may be pedantic, but I'm not sure this actually uses the internet at all?
If you were being pedantic, you would have capitalised Internet. 'The Internet' is not the same 'internet' as the word is used in 'internet of things'. I suggest you look up the sources cited by the Wikipedia article on 'Internet of Things' and make your own mind up.
Whether this widget or the SMS-based one another poster mentioned, it's a great use of tech. My uncle raises a few cows on his property. He lost one just like that, complications of a delivery nobody knew was happening. Found the poor heifer dead the next day.
Have to admit though, sometimes the useful tech isn't terribly dignified!
Finally something useful in IoS land. Sounds reasonably secure so we won't get DDoS attacks via the bovine instead of the stuff used by human cattle like toys, light bulbs, etc.
I know some farmers/ranchers who have had many a sleepless night during calving times. I'll pass this article to a couple of them that have the knowledge and see what they think.
And you can bet it's quite a bit more expensive than the usual mass market s**t.
It's quite amazing that the guts of a mobile phone can basically fit into the form factor of one of the smaller memory card formats.
Other potentially useful applications are monitoring street light failure for replacement (the SoA in replacing large numbers of street lights is a)Someone reports it has failed b)Man with van drives round after dark checking they are all working).
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