Kinect

The goal of Kinect is to prepare commercialization for the first of its kind livestock kinetic energy harvesting device for enabling future autonomous smart wearables for precision livestock farming (PLF) applications. PLF refers to an agricultural management concept utilizing wearable sensing devices to monitor health and other attributes of individual animals. The PLF solutions currently available on the market are powered by finite-lifetime batteries, which are expensive and heavy and require regular replacements and recycling, impairing both the device manufacturers’ and the end-users’ (farmers’) businesses. Building on the strong expertise of Tampere University on kinetic energy harvesting and electromechanical energy conversion, as well as the farm animal experience of the Principal Investigator and the collaborators, Kinect aims to reduce the battery-dependency of PLF wearables by extracting energy from animal movements to produce solutions with greater autonomy and longer lifetimes. This brings competitive advantage to livestock PLF device manufacturers and increases the productivity of end-users.

Research to Business funding