Exton, PA – April 14, 2014 – ThingWorx™, a PTC® (Nasdaq: PTC) business and leading Internet of Things (IoT) and M2M platform provider, today announced that Vital Herd™, Inc, a Software as a Service (SaaS) solution provider for animal health and nutrition management initiatives, has selected the ThingWorx® application platform to power its M2M non-invasive individual animal monitoring technology. This technology will offer advanced intelligence and analytics to dairy and beef operations to improve animal health and nutrition management, which is largely done by visual observation today.
According to the US Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) latest report, approximately four million animals die in the U.S. as part of its dairy and beef production, while many more get sick. This represents many billions of dollars in economic losses each year for U.S. dairy and beef producers in terms of lost revenue, high treatment costs and high feed costs.
Vital Herd’s first product targets dairy producers and offers them a practical, data-driven solution for improving productivity. Each producing cow ingests an ePill which contains a novel sensor that captures real time vital sign information from each cow, for the life of the animal. Vital Herd is using the ThingWorx application development platform to normalize the data, create vital sign benchmarks for each animal and then deliver that information back to the producer in an easy-to-understand, actionable dashboard format. This data offers new and early insight into productivity-limiting illnesses, suboptimal nutrition programs and even environmental factors such as heat stress that can reduce production.
“Cattle health, nutritional and well-being management today is done largely by visually inspecting the animals throughout the day. This is a very inefficient way to identify problems because it relies on physical clues, which occur late when it is difficult and costly to reverse,” said Brian Walsh, CEO, Vital Herd. “Being able to collect individual animal data economically that can provide early insights into sub-optimal health or nutrition is vitally important and can make a very meaningful impact in productivity. We chose the ThingWorx platform because we are able to rapidly develop intuitive applications that highlight what action may be needed before possible disease or nutrition becomes a clinical problem.”
The ThingWorx platform provides Vital Herd with a complete software development, runtime, and intelligence environment, along with rapid application building tools, allowing the company to quickly enhance their customer-facing applications without incurring additional development costs.
“Vital Herd is a good example of how M2M technology can improve animal well-being,” said Russ Fadel, president, ThingWorx. “Using ThingWorx, Vital Herd can quickly bring new capabilities to market, offering significant economic gain for the producers in addition to better animal productivity. We look forward to continuing to work with Vital Herd.”
Additional Resources:
· The ThingWorx platform
· ThingWorx markets
About Vital Herd, Inc.
Vital Herd, Inc. was founded in early 2012 to modernize the global beef and dairy production industries through continuous, autonomous and individual animal monitoring for increased producer profits and improved animal well-being. For more information about Vital Herd, please visit
www.vitalherd.com.
About ThingWorx, a PTC Business
ThingWorx, a PTC (Nasdaq: PTC) business, provides the first platform designed to efficiently build and run the applications of today’s connected world. ThingWorx’s model-based design and search-based intelligence simplifies application development efforts by minimizing cost and risk while accelerating time to value. The ThingWorx® platform combines the key functionality of Web 2.0, search, and social collaboration, and applies it to the world of “things”, including connected products, machines, sensors, systems, and industrial equipment. Businesses use the ThingWorx platform to rapidly deliver innovative applications and connected solutions across markets ranging from manufacturing, energy and food, to Machine-to-Machine (M2M) remote monitoring and service, as well as in emerging Internet of Things applications, including smart cities, smart grid, agriculture, and transportation. For more information, please visit our website at www.thingworx.com and our blog at www.thingworx.com/blog or follow us on Twitter at @ThingWorx.