Sensors and AI are finding their way into the barnyard

I worked on electronically herding cows 10+ years ago and talked with Temple Grandin about it. She thought the idea of relying on sensors alone to monitor animal health was a bad idea. Unless the sensors can detect every possible disease and problem that a rancher or vet can detect in person, the risk is that some animal problems will go unnoticed by the sensors and the animals will suffer. Also the ranchers may not care about that if it reduces costs and profits remain the same, so using sensors could cost lots of animal misery.

The same is true of using sensors to monitor the health of people. Many ideas that the food industry has used to engineer foods for people have come from the cattle industry (who have a big interest in stuffing more food into cows) so testing sensors on cows may be a first step towards using them on people.

non-paywall: https://archive.vn/145aA

Also note this article is from 2019.

> An Austrian firm called smaxtec has developed a sensor that can be swallowed. It lodges inside the reticulum, one of a cow’s four stomachs, and stays there for the rest of the animal’s life, monitoring body temperature, movement and stomach acidity, and uploading the results when the cow is near a wireless detector.

(insert "scream" emoji here)