October 4, 2022

Ingenum's system aims to reduce need for large scale actions against deadly animal diseases in New Zealand

Ingenum, a vet research startup in New Zealand, has launched Sentinel, a system that aims to reduce the need for a large scale response to fatal animal diseases.

The company's founder, Tom Brownlie, has seen first hand the devastation mass outbreaks can cause. And the prospect of the disease arriving in New Zealand is worrying for him, which is why he's partnered with Qrious, Spark Business Group's artificial intelligence and data analytics business, to launch an early warning system.

The system gathers data from government agencies, vet practices and on-farm technologies, and uses artificial intelligence to detect health issues within animals that the human eye cannot see.

Qrious' Christopher Laing said the data is widespread, but helps to give an accurate picture of the health of livestock nationwide.

"The machine finds ways to integrate all of this data together and understand at a high level where there might be subtle patterns emerging that indicate that disease is present or that its spreading," Laing said.

If there's inconsistency in the data, it'll raise an alert for authorities to take action.

"As the data is coming in, it's not waiting till that evening to sit down and have a think about it; it's in real time assessing: "Is this data starting to indicate that we have a problem?"," Laing said. "So as fast as we can collect the data, Sentinel can process it and it can get that information out to the biosecurity responses that need to happen.

"Time is of the essence when you're dealing with any kind of outbreak- we saw this with humans in the coronavirus pandemic- that the earlier you can get onto something the better chance you have of stopping it, the closer we can get to data coming in in real time and acting in real time, the more farms we'll be able to save from potentially devastating outbreaks."

Sentinel is already up and running in both New Zealand and Australia, with hopes for it to be launched in Europe next year.

- 1News