University of Antwerp will monitor the behavior of small wild animals: “Already generated interest information” (Antwerp)
Research center imec and the University of Antwerp launched a new spin-off on Tuesday. The company Internet of Small Animals, of IoSA, has developed an ultra-lightweight tracker that can monitor the behavior of small wild animals, such as birds, rodents of toads. This has been announced by imec in a press release.
debnSource: BELGA
The tools to effectively monitor animal behavior are currently not sufficiently developed. Existing trackers are large and heavy, especially for smaller wild animals. To get there, IoSA devised a tracker that amounts to a maximum of 5 percent of an animal’s total weight. For example, it was already able to develop a tracker weighing only 0.9 grams, which is suitable for tracking birds and mice, for example.
“This tracker was used to observe the behavior of vultures, to monitor disease transmission from rats in Tanzania and to assess the effectiveness of contraceptive feed for pigeons,” said Lucinda Kirkpatrick, CEO of IoSA. “This has been very interesting information about which was missing until today.”
The trackers consume very little energy. “We succeeded in optimizing the Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) protocol,” says Maarten Weyn, co-founder of IoSA. “Each tracker itself sends out BLE signals and detects the signals from trackers in the vicinity. When two trackers come close to each other, they measure each other’s signal strength and estimate the distance between them. Only during that very short period does the tracker spread energy.”