Since its inception in 2011, April 9 has been observed by a niche audience as global IoT Day in honor of the “Internet of Things,” which is projected to comprise some 50 billion connected devices by 2020.
According to organizers at the IoT Council: “Anyone is free to create an IoT Day event in your local community. … It doesn’t matter whether you are participating from an entrepreneur, engineer, industrial designer or novice perspective: the events will offer different types of activities tailored to local audiences form around the world. The time is now to start having the important conversations on the technologies, security, data privacy and enormous potential that an ‘Internet of Things’ is capable of.”
Here’s a list of IoT Day events, including activities from Stockholm to Thailand.
In honor of IoT Day, let’s take a look at just one of the many vertical application use cases, this one targeting agricultural production.
According to Fujitsu, global consumption of beef and dairy products is on the rise, which is driving up the cost of cows.
“As a result, one livestock farming issue presently gathering attention around the world is how to raise the birth rate of cattle,” the company noted. “In order to solve the issue, Fujitsu has created an innovative solution, which increases success rates of artificial insemination and turns your business profitable.”
The general idea is to use biometrics and other sensing techniques to know when a cow is most fertile, which is often accompanied by an increase in movement so pedometers are used to track that aspect of bovine fertility. According to the company, 60% of the time a cow’s fertility cycle begins is at night when no humans are present to perform an artificial insemination. With the monitoring platform, which feeds data through an analytics engine, livestock handlers can receive a text message when an animal is most fertile.
“Successful fertilization in a single artificial insemination attempt can be increased thus producing more calves and milk and improving business operations,” according to Fujitsu.
If you want to learn more about how the IoT is being leveraged in this particular case, here’s a video.
