Surgically Implanted Sensors

A Biohacker Created Surgically Implanted Sensors to Track Cows

The subcutaneous devices are designed to monitor cattle and provide data...but their inventor really wants them to be used in humans.

By Laura Yan

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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.

RFID trackers are often implanted in animals and livestock, but mostly for identification purposes, whereas wearable collars can track activity or temperature. The EmbediVet gets surgically inserted under local anesthetic, and is apparently less bothersome for cows. The device runs on a coin-cell battery with an estimated three year life, and potentially offers a more effective way to collect data and track bovine behavior.

Cannon is plotting out the early data the sensors emit. Eventually, he hopes to develop a smartphone app for farmers to monitor animal status or be alerted to early issues (currently, farmers simply rely on waiting and watching to see if cows are eating enough, potentially ill or pregnant). “As a veterinarian, if there’s some way I can detect animal diseases, animal discomfort, earlier, then I’m ahead of the ballgame when it comes to providing care and welfare to these animals,” Kerry Rood, an associate professor at Utah State University’s School of Veterinary Medicine Rood who implanted the cow trackers, told MIT Technology Review.

Though for Cannon, of course, the end goal is still to get humans more comfortable with similar devices — perhaps, through a future “human line” from Livestock labs.

(via MIT Technology Review)