Farmers use mobile phones to connect to cows

A new collar for the cows was developed by those at the University of Strathclyde, the Scottish Agricultural College that will let the farmers to take care of the health conditions of their cattle. The equipment requires each cow to wear an intelligent collar that will pick up the subtle movements using the sensor. It is the same type of sensor that is used Wii gaming.

The collar will generate the continuous record of the cattle's activities. These results are sent to the farmer through 3G or other wireless technologies and are accessible using a control hub or mobile phone. The wireless technology allows the collar to be accessible from anywhere allowing the farmers to check the status of the cattle through mobile phone.

The collar senses the position of the cow's head in three dimensions and then detects if the hind legs of the animal starts to lower which is the common initial sign of illness. The farmers can set alerts to their phone to get notified when the animal is having some trouble.

Without this approach, individual monitoring of each cow is needed which is quite time consuming. It has now completed the development phase and is about to enter the testing phase.