Though they look indistinguishable from the other cows on a dairy farm in Utah, three cyborg cows with implanted sensors are munching on grass and sending data to help train an artificial neural network. A biohacker named Tim Cannon created the subcutaneous trackers for livestock after his own experiments with RFID implants. Eventually, he wants to bring the technology back to humans.
Cannon got a Circadia Sensor implanted into his arm in 2013. The sleep and temperature monitoring device, he thought, could help him collect data for AI software he developed to predict illness. But investors were hard to find for the implant: outside of the biohacking community, people remain skeptical of having sensor tracking devices implanted inside their bodies.
And so, Cannon turned to livestock. Working with a tech incubator in Australia, he founded Livestock Labs and created the bovine FitBit, which he named EmbediVet. The sensors can record cows’ heart rate, pulse, chewing frequency, temperature, and movements around the farm.
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