Acility, Alliot Technologies
Topics: Tracker, LoRaWAN, Network Tech
Transcript Excerpt
A worker from Reindeer Herders Association in Rovaniemi explains how Reindeer herding is very important to Lapland. People in Lapland have been doing Reindeer herding for several hundred years. However, in today’s world, it is one of the most traditional ways of making a living which is still in practice in Lapland. There is a huge amount of Reindeer roaming in the Lapland wilderness for a large part of the year. It is very challenging work for the Reindeer herders to be able to help their work with digitalization. To overcome this challenge, the association introduced a compact, lightweight, cost-efficient tracking solution which enables the Reindeer herders to track and follow the animals when they are roaming wild in Lapland. These trackers are based on LoRaWAN technology which is new in the market. The association has closely worked with Actility, and the partnership has been very successful.
In Finland, the reindeer herders can receive compensation from the government if one of the reindeer gets killed either by road traffic or by a wild animal, but they must provide evidence with the carcass to show that the animal was being nervous or killed. To achieve this, the herders are using LoRaWAN trackers to pinpoint the location of the animal. Using the trackers also allows the herders to track reindeer killed by
predators because before, it was impossible to find the carcass, so the herders were denied compensation from the government. Using a mobile application, the herders can quickly locate where their reindeer are without leaving their homes. Last summer, the presenter heard about the IoT reindeer pilot and contacted the Digita employee to ask for the test and offline mapping technologies because the company thinks it is a perfect platform for this pilot. The first phase of this pilot will run in next summer, and it is mainly about technology testing and evaluation. The company is evaluating various tracking devices, and they are also evaluating what kind of network is needed to build into Lapland to be able to provide this service to the owners. The presenter provided an example of one of the asset-tracking devices the company is evaluating. In the first place, it is a GPS tracker, which is also an acceleration meter that helps in counting the animal’s movement and locating the animal’s position. It sends this data to the servers in the cloud using the LoRaWAN network. In this first phase of the pilot, data about the quality of our network is also gathered. The device sends the location every three hours, and with the battery installed in it, it will last
about a year.
