Innovation Anthology #3: President
What happens when a cow gets the sniffles? Usually by the time a farmer discovers his livestock is sick, it’s too late. But help is on the way. And that’s in the form of wireless sensors that monitor the state of a cow’s health.
The Feedlot Animal Remote Monitoring System or FARM is adapted from wireless technology developed by Lloyd Osler of Ovistech Inc to track pandemics like SARS. An ear tag measures the animal’s temperature and a neck collar senses if the cow is eating, drinking and walking about.
LO: Well, it’s a totally wireless system and it reports it back to a system that we then analyze that and can provide alerts as to the onset of an illness in an animal and that then gets fed back to the farmer and his production system and he can cull that animal out or treat it in advance of it getting more ill than it would otherwise have been.
Tests show the FARM system raises the recovery rate of sick cattle from almost nil to 85 percent.
Ovistech is now collaborating with the Alberta Research Council and others to combine the sensors into a single ear tag. Once commercialized, these FARM sensors will revolutionize health care for cows.
Thanks today to the Alberta Research Council.
FOR INNOVATION ANTHOLOGY, I’M CHERYL CROUCHER
Guest
Lloyd Osler, PhD,
Ovistech Inc, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, losler@ovistech.com
Sponsor
Alberta Research Council
Established as the first provincial research organization in Canada, the Alberta Research Council is 85 years old. The Alberta Research Council (ARC) develops and commercializes technologies to give customers a competitive advantage. A leader in innovation, ARC provides solutions globally to the energy, life sciences, agriculture, environment, forestry and manufacturing sectors.
ARC performs about five per cent of the roughly $1.5 billion in R&D done in Alberta each year, and generates revenues of approximately $84 million per year. ARC operates from five sites across the province in Edmonton, Calgary, Vegreville and Devon and employs more than 600 highly-skilled people.
In January 2010, under the new Alberta Innovation Framework, the Alberta Research Council was restructured and incorporated into the new provincial agency Alberta Innovates Technology Futures.
Program Date: 2007-01-23