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A hand-held device used to read ear tags on farm animals, developed by Massey industrial designer Tony Parker and technology company Gallagher, has won the inaugural International Innovation Award at Fieldays.
The HR4 (hand-held reader 4) is designed to allow farm workers to automatically identify individual animals by a unique electronic number (containing information such as sex, weight and veterinary treatment data), attached to the stock in the form of a tag or bolus.
"The reader is backed up by an animal database which not only pulls in data from the reader, but integrates data from a range of sources, including devices made by other manufacturers and data provided by independent service providers," Professor Parker says.
The product, which was only launched this week, was announced as the premier winner of the inaugural award at a function following the opening of Fieldays at Mystery Creek in Hamilton.
The awards competition was organised by the Fieldays Innovation Centre.
Professor Parker, who is associate pro vice-chancellor at Massey's College of Creative Arts on the Wellington campus, says it is a great honour to be part of the award winning team for a product he predicts will be used around the world by a lot of farmers.
He led the industrial design of the product including its ergonomics and overall appearance, working as part of Gallagher's project development team.
"The award win is recognition for Gallagher and the team too because we're talking about the involvement of a lot of people and investment," he says.
That includes Massey University's creative design studio Open Lab, which was involved in developing the usability of the system including the design of icons and the layout of content for the screen of the reader.
Gallagher product manager Dan Loughnane says this was particularly important for older farmers who will benefit from the bold colour display that allows easy readability of the screeds of data scanned from the ear tags of farm stock.
"They can do all that on the stick and in the yard," he says.
More than three years of research is involved in the production of the reader that updates an earlier version of the same product. Professor Parker has previously worked with Gallagher on world-leading energizer and livestock weighing and electronic identification products. He is also the chief designer of the Hulme supercar.
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