MEMS for thoroughbreds

Two years ago cows entered the Internet of Things (IoT) when Dairymaster's MooMonitor began tracking the herds, monitoring each cow's activity, letting them in and out of automatic doors and detecting when they are ovulating. Now in 2015 Horse Sense's Pegasus is doing the same thing, and more, for horses.

Pegasus are MEMS-based devices attached on a horse's tail that sense everything the cow's collar (MooMonitor) does plus the horse's temperature, which is especially important for high value horses. There are about 250 million cows worldwide, but only 59 million horses. However, the average worth of the equine population is much higher than the bovine population. Horses bred for racing can be worth millions of dollars.

Ian Chen Sensor Solutions Division marketing at Freescale Semiconductor describes how its microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) chips enable the Pegasus from Horse Sense Shoes, LLC (a division of HSS Global) can monitor a horse's posture, exercise patterns, behaviors and temperature 24/7/365 and send automatic alerts to veterinarians before problems develop. (Source: Horse Sense, used with permission.)

The tough thing about keeping horses healthy is that their temperature needs to be measured multiple times per week, and the only reliable way to do it is with a rectal thermometer. You would think that they would get used to this, but they don't. Every time it takes two people, plus restraining their back legs to prevent them from kicking the guy inserting the horse rectal thermometer.

With the Pegasus MEMS system, however, a temperature measurement is made every time the horse passes flatulence, which anybody who has been around horses knows is many times a day. Plus the horses activity, sleeping habits, posture and more can be determined but the Freescale inertial sensors also housed by Pegasus.

The Pegasus MEMS module tracts expensive racehorses 24/7/365 for temperature, posture, exercise, transport keeping realtime catalogs, producing daily, weekly and monthly logs with automatic texting of alerts to owners and veterinarian. (Source: Horse Sense, used with permission.)