What it is: Farmers are using wearable computers to track and monitor cows in dairy farms.
Many people think they don’t need a wearable computer and even worse, may think there’s no purpose for a wearable computer. While wearable computers like the Apple Watch can monitor health in real-time, there are other uses for wearable computers as well.
Swiss Lane Farms in Michigan uses wearable devices on its dairy cows. The trackers, called T4C by Lely, are placed around a cow’s neck. This wearable device tracks how many steps the animal has taken, milk production, how many times the cow gets milked each day, her weight and how much she chews. The trackers use sensor technology to record and transfer information to a software system monitored by the farm.
The biggest use of the trackers at Paramount Dairy is tracking how active the cows are.
“You get a better tab on all your cows,” Brent Moyer, the general manage for Paramount Dairy, said. “It helps you from the standpoint of being able to identify when one doesn’t feel good sooner. It gives you the ability to make a decision faster maybe than before you had a system.”
Wearable computers can track animals, packages, vehicles, and people. Wearable computers essentially put a computer in a convenient, light weight device that is attached to whatever object you want to track whether it’s alive or not. Wearable computers can help identify movement and behavior patterns that would be too time-consuming for people to track accurately every moment.
The future of wearable computers is here. It’s going to appear in different forms throughout society so get ready to see them popping up in all sorts of areas of life. The next time you drink a glass of milk, just remember the cost may have been kept down by using a wearable computer.
To read more about wearable computers in the dairy industry, click here.
