Cows test tracking and monitoring tech of future...
Subcutaneous Fitbits? These cows are modeling the
tracking technology of the future
Livestock Labs is getting bio-monitors under cows’ skin
in hopes of helping farmers spot disease earlier, and it wants to bring its
tech to people, too.
by Rachel Metz May
15, 2018
Somewhere on a dairy farm in Wellsville, Utah, are three
cyborg cows, indistinguishable from the
rest of the herd.
Just like the other cows, they eat, drink, and chew their
cud. Occasionally, they walk over to a big, spinning red-and-black brush,
suspended at bovine back height, for a scratch. But while the rest of the cows
just get their scratch and move on, these cows deliver data. Trackers implanted
in their bodies use low-energy Bluetooth to ping a nearby base station and
transfer information about the cows’ chewing frequency, temperature, and
general rambling around the farm.
These cows are the first to try a device called
EmbediVet, created by a startup named Livestock Labs. For now, they’re just
going about their normal lives, unintentionally providing data that helps train
an artificial neural network. The hope is that in the near future, this AI will
help farmers figure out quickly and easily how well cows and other livestock
are eating, whether they’re getting sick or about to give birth—things that are
typically done today just by watching and waiting but are difficult to spot
when you’ve got hundreds or thousands of animals to keep an eye on.
Embedded RFID sensors and other trackers have long been
used in livestock, though generally just for identifying each animal. There are
already some behavior-tracking wearables out there, such as collars, that use
sensors to pinpoint events like cud-chewing and illness. But Livestock Labs
claims that once EmbediVet is implanted—currently in a surgical procedure done under
local anesthetic—it’s less annoying to the cow than a wearable and,
potentially, a more powerful way to collect useful data and spot bovine
behavior patterns over time.
This subcutaneous tracker actually had a human tryout
before it even got anywhere near a cow. And its creator hopes to eventually
bring the cow-tested technology back under your skin.
Tried in humans, retooled for cattle
Livestock Labs CEO Tim Cannon never set out to make what
is, in essence, an embedded Fitbit for cows. What he really wanted was to use
the same technology to reengineer himself, and anyone else who wanted to do
likewise.
Cannon, a software developer and biohacker, took his
first plunge into surgically upgrading himself in 2010 after seeing a video of
a Scottish biohacker named Lepht Anonym talking about the sensations produced
by a magnet she implanted in her finger. Shortly thereafter, he got his own
finger magnet and cofounded Grindhouse Wetware, a biohacking startup in
Pittsburgh that focuses on designing and building implantable electronics.
For years at Grindhouse, Cannon and his team made several
sensors, including a device called Circadia, which included a thermometer and
LED lights that glowed from beneath the skin.
Cannon hoped Circadia could collect data and work with AI
software he built to start predicting illnesses. And in 2013, after about a
year of work and $2,000 in development costs, he had a Circadia sensor
surgically implanted into his arm.
“When we did this, we were actually trying to throw down
a glove to the medical industry, to technological fields, to say, ‘Look, if a
bunch of idiots in a basement can do this while smoking joints and listening to
Wu Tang, what the fuck is the problem?’” Cannon says.
The problem, it seems, is that beyond a small community
of hackers, grinders, and curious observers, most people just aren’t interested
in having things implanted in their bodies, especially if these things aren’t
medically necessary.
Grindhouse tried selling the implants it created, but it
wasn’t making money. It couldn’t pull in any investors, so Cannon and others were
funding the work themselves with their day jobs. They grew aware of the
enormous regulation challenges they faced if they wanted to make non-essential
implants for humans, he says, and realized that the job would undoubtedly
include years of work and millions of dollars.
Then, last spring, an Australian biohacker named
Meow-Ludo Disco Gama Meow-Meow (yes, really) contacted Cannon with an idea. A
tech incubator in Sydney, Cicada Innovations, was about to launch a program
that focused on helping build agricultural food technology companies (the
country has a large livestock industry, with about 25.5 million cattle). How
about putting sensors in cows instead of people?
It was like a “Duh, it’s obvious” moment, Cannon says.
His new venture, dubbed Livestock Labs, was accepted to Cicada’s GrowLab
program. In September, Cannon moved to Sydney from his home in Pittsburgh, and
soon started working with a small team to remake the Circadia sensor from
scratch into one that could be implanted in farm animals.
Within months, Livestock Labs readied a new device—now
called EmbediVet—for testing in cattle. Covered in a clear resin, it includes
an ARM processor and Bluetooth and long-range radios, as well as a thermometer,
accelerometer, and heart-rate monitor and pulse oximeter for measuring heart
rate, blood oxygen levels, temperature, and basic activity. It runs on a
coin-cell battery the company expects will last for about three years.
On the farm
On April 3, Kerry Rood, an associate professor at Utah
State University’s School of Veterinary Medicine, implanted a series of
EmbediVet sensors in three cows on the school’s dairy farm: two in the left
side of the lower jaw, and one between two ribs. (Since there’s not much
existing data about the best places for implanted activity trackers in cattle,
and Livestock Labs wants to log chewing and rumination, these seemed like good
starting points.)
To perform this minor surgery, Rood gave the cows local
anesthesia, sliced their hide in the proper spots, slipped in an EmbediVet
prototype, and stitched them up. Over a month later, he says, they’re
tolerating the implants well.
LIVESTOCK LABS
Why do it? Rood thinks that this kind of device can be
more accurate than a wearable one such as a collar or an anklet, especially
when it comes to tracking a metric like body temperature, which correlates with
disease, in thick-skinned animals.
To check out the early data, Cannon says, he’s built some
charting software that can pull in what’s gathered from the cows’ EmbediVet
devices and plot it out. Eventually, Livestock Labs intends for farmers to use
a smartphone app to check out their animals’ status and see alerts about
issues.
“As a veterinarian, if there’s some way I can detect
animal diseases, animal discomfort, earlier, then I’m ahead of the ballgame
when it comes to providing care and welfare to these animals,” Rood says.
With just homemade needles and some cells from an ear
biopsy, Jose Cibelli of Cyagra demonstrates how to build a blue-ribbon steer.
Beyond the work Livestock Labs is doing with Rood, Cannon
says, other research trials are in the works with Charles Sturt University and
the University of New England, both in Australia, as well as trials with some
commercial farmers he won’t name. He hopes EmbediVet will be available in a
public beta test next March.
“We stumbled onto something that was a lot bigger and
more in demand than we thought, in this particular sector of the world,” Cannon
says.
Ryan Reuter, an associate professor of animal science at
Oklahoma State University who studies beef cattle, thinks the tracker could be
quite useful. He cautions, however, that there are a lot of factors to consider
with its design. For instance, cows are big and strong and like to rub on
things (such as that aforementioned back scratcher), so anything implanted in
them needs to be rugged enough to hold up to abuse. It also needs to stay in
place, he says, especially with animals being raised to be eaten.
“That would be important in food animals, so you make
sure that you put the implant somewhere that it has no chance of ending up in a
food product for humans,” he says.
There’s also the issue of pricing, since margins in dairy
and beef cattle production are slim. The components of EmbediVet cost $20 right
now, Cannon says, but it’s not clear what the eventual price will be; Reuter
says that somewhere in the range of $10 or $20 a cow would get beef or dairy
farmers interested.
Back to you, humans?
These days, Cannon splits his time between Pittsburgh and
Sydney. Livestock Labs has $2 million in early funding from Australia’s
livestock industry group, Meat & Livestock Australia (which is also a
GrowLab partner), and additional funds from individual investors in the US.
For now, he’s concentrating on making sure that the
implants aren’t causing any unintended consequences with the cyborg bovines.
“They are developing a slight urge to destroy humanity,”
he jokes, “but we’re monitoring it.”
Joking aside, Cannon is serious about one goal that’s far
beyond anything his startup may do to help farmers and their livestock. He says
he also hopes the company gets people more comfortable with the idea of bodily
implants in general. He is adamant that one day he will return to offering
sensors to people—though he’s not sure if it will be a totally new company or a
“human line” from Livestock Labs.
The second option, he admits, might be “just a little bit
too much for people.”
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