Agricultural enterprises oftentimes accommodate several hundred cows that all need to be fed and taken care of healthwise.  The healthier the animals, the higher are the yields. During the CeBIT that opened its doors today until March 24, the Kaiserslautern-based start up “InnoCow” is presenting a new intelligent diagnostic tool for dairy cows.

An application to optimize dairy production

Similarly to men and women who use fitness apps in order to check on their health and training conditions, cows can now be tracked remotely and in real-time during grazing, ruminating, or at the milking parlor. The automated diagnostic tool “InnoCow” was developed by the spin-off of the German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) – also named InnoCow. The system collects all the necessary information at once, in order to track the health of each individual animal and to recognize an impending heat. Based on these data the system also calculates an optimized amount of food per animal. By way of this health and heat monitoring InnoCow affords farmers a better and easier assessment of each animal, which will lead to an optimized dairy production.  Moreover, the system also recognizes diseases at very early stages, which ultimately benefits the animals as well.

All the information at one glance

The data are being analyzed via the servers of InnoCow. The self-learning algorithms are constantly adapting according to the behavior of the animals. The manufacturers also created an online application that enable the farmers to check on their animals individually, or keep track of their entire herd. This represents a huge advantage for the user, since they will now only need a single system to manage their animals. Another advantage – according to InnoCow – is the exact analysis of the data, which generates far fewer false reports compared to previous systems.

InnoCow at the CeBIT

Because of its innovate business concept InnoCow could already impress at start-up contests: InnoCow won the national contest for business plans 1,2,3, GO 2016. Additionally, as winners of the “Gründerwettbewerb – IKT Innovativ“ the founders were already subsidized by the Federal Ministry of Economic Affairs and Energy in 2015 during the formation of their spin-off from the DFKI.

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