Nedap : brings Augmented Reality into the dairy farm 13 November 2018

Intuitive interaction between technology and farmers
Herd insights from dairy management and monitoring systems are currently presented to dairy farmers on devices such as PC's, tablets and smartphones and often hard to understand. Herd sizes are rapidly increasing. A high level of technology is implemented on farms, the amount of data being gathered is overwhelming and qualified staff to work with it is hard to find and keep. Therefore, Nedap strongly believes that data needs to be turned into valuable insights and the interaction between technology and its users needs to be as intuitive and natural as possible. With the aim to serve farmers and their teams in an optimal way and make them more efficient, productive and successful in their work.

Herd insights brought to life
By combining Nedap CowControl with Augmented Reality technology, Nedap offers dairy farmers a revolutionary and highly intuitive way to receive herd insights and perform actions based upon them. Reproduction insights, health information and the location of individual cows are now brought to life. They are presented within the farmer's physical world and actual field of view. The information is shown above the cows and automatically adapts to the farmer's location in the barn and responds to the direction in which he or she looks. As a result, the farmer automatically receives the right information at the right time and place in the real-world context when walking the barn.

Hand gestures and voice commands
Actions can be performed and registered in Nedap's management system only using hand gestures and voice commands. This means the limitations of a physical handheld device are eliminated, allowing the farmer to interact with information in the most natural way and use both hands for other tasks. In case of a fertility routine for instance, there is no need for a second person to give information and no administration afterwards entering treatment information into the computer.

Combination is key
What makes this new way of experiencing herd insights possible is the latest technology in the field of Augmented Reality and Speech Recognition, together with the widely proven Nedap CowControl system that monitors each cow's behavior and her real-time location 24/7. Nedap has built a solution that smartly brings these technologies together.

The device currently being used is Microsoft's HoloLens. One could say that Nedap is a step ahead of technology, since AR devices have to become more farm-proof, which they seem to be in the near future. As soon as that is the case, Nedap is ready with a generous lead in development and experience.