Can A Cow be an IoT Platform?

Can A Cow be an IoT Platform?

Summary:  This is my favorite IoT story. We are so used to IoT platforms being physical objects that we forget about the potential for biologics.  In terms of direct economic reward little will compare to this story about the IoT and cows.

This is my favorite IoT story which I first heard from Joseph Sirosh, CVP of Machine Learning for Microsoft at the spring Strata convention in San Jose.  We are so used to IoT platforms being physical objects like cars or thermostats or gaming consoles that we forget about the potential for biologics. Of course FitBit will immediately come to mind for human beings but in terms of direct economic reward little will compare to this story about the IoT and cows.

The setting is Japan but it could just as easily have been Iowa.  The players are Fujitsu who developed this system and Microsoft Azure providing the NoSQL DB on which it runs.

The opportunity requires seeing a dairy farm as a simple manufacturing environment with cows and feed coming in one end and milk products coming out the other.  The immediate problem for the farmer is replacing or adding to his production capacity, the cows.

Dairy cattle are largely ‘produced’ by artificial insemination and we’ve been doing that long enough that we can get a 70% conception rate, but only if the procedure occurs when the cow is in estrus.  That proves much harder to predict since it mostly relies on the farmer’s experience-based intuition which turns out isn’t all that good. In fact, farmers only get it right statistically about 55% of the time meaning that the true pregnancy rate is only 39%.

So Fujitsu reasoned if estrus detection could be made perhaps 95% accurate the pregnancy rate would go up to 67% or a whopping 70% improvement in performance.  But estrus detection isn’t all that easy since Bessie is only in estrus about once every 21 days; estrus lasts only 12 to 18 hours, and just to make it that much more difficult, usually occurs between 10 pm and 8 am, just when the poor exhausted farmer is asleep.

So first let’s talk about how this all turned out.  In the chart below the green line represents the number of steps normally taken by a cow and the yellow line represents the steps taken by a cow in estrus. It turns out that the onset of estrus can be detected because Bessie starts doing a little dance.

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