If there are hundreds of dairy cows on the farm, it takes a lot of thought to track their health and whereabouts, but the future “sensor tag (sensor tag)” may be a good partner for livestock farmers,
Chinese scientists, on the other hand, want to use the cow’s motion to power smartwatch sensors strapped to the cow’s ankles and neck.
At present, some ranches use sensor tags to track the location of cattle to prevent them from getting lost or running too far during the wind.
Scientists at Southwest Jiaotong University in China have come up with the idea of a “smart farm”, building advanced environmental sensors and using the animals’ own energy to power them.
On pastures, monitoring cattle’s environmental and health information can help prevent disease and improve the efficiency of pasture farming and management, said co-author Zutao Zhang.
The information that needs to be obtained may include oxygen concentration, ambient temperature and humidity, animal activity level, reproductive cycle, health status and milk production.
In a hypothetical smart ranch, cows would wear a wearable device shaped like a seashell, similar to a smart watch.
The pendulum inside the device is used to swing, and the kinetic energy is amplified with magnets and coils, and finally the kinetic energy is converted into electricity and stored in a lithium battery.
Yajia Pan, an energy researcher at Southwest Jiaotong University, said that we can harvest a lot of kinetic energy from cattle walking, running, and even neck movements.
The team is also testing the energy-harvesting potential of the device in the lab, demonstrating that it is possible to generate enough energy for small sensors.
The scientists also actually tested the device on humans, and found that just a little jog was all it took to activate the temperature measurement function.
Zhang said that kinetic energy is ubiquitous in the environment, such as branches and leaves swaying in the wind, waves undulating, etc., all contain a lot of kinetic energy, and we should not waste this energy.
