Patent Application
20180235186
The present invention relates to monitoring the health and behavior of caged birds and their environment, and more particularly, an apparatus and system for determining a bird's weight and activity level, as well as the ambient temperature and amount of light in the bird's cage, and recording this information over time. This information is valuable to avian researchers and pet bird owners.
Birds held in captivity are commonly prey animals; and as such, strive to hide signs of illness and injury. By the time a bird shows obvious signs of an illness or injury, it has often progressed a great deal from the onset of the condition. Frequent monitoring of the bird and its environment can enable caretakers to aid in identifying any problems the bird has in advance of observable symptoms. The present invention allows for constant monitoring without any user intervention.
A common proxy used for health in birds is their weight. Sudden weight loss or gain can be indicative of a wide variety of disease or other physiological problems.
Birds are ordinarily only observed by their caretakers for a limited part of the day, and it can be difficult to determine if their level of activity has significantly increased or, more worryingly, decreased compared to normal.
A bird's environment, namely temperature and exposure to light, can affect their behavior and overall health.
Since a bird's weight is a common health metric, common stand-alone scales are available for sale with bird perches attached. These products are used by coaxing a bird to perch upon the device, which is then read, to obtain the bird's weight. Then, the bird's weight can be compared to previous measurements of the same bird to make a determination as to the bird's health.
Bird perches with built-in recording scales are known in the art. Specifically, U.S. Pat. No. 4,811,694 discloses a Bird feeder with scale, where a bird is drawn to a perch by the lure of food. The perch then lowers with the bird's weight against a spring, and the device measures the bird's weight by amount of spring displacement. The device can be set to trigger an alarm to alert the user to manually record the weight, or the mechanism can be attached to a strip-chart recorder.
The present invention is fundamentally different than the prior art as it is designed to be mounted to a bird cage and perform measurements, rather than be a stand-alone device with a feeder for poultry. The present invention also provides key improvements over this device. One, by the use of a strain gauge load cell rather than a spring displacement mechanism to measure the bird's weight, the perch upon which the bird alights will move imperceptibly to the bird so as to not disturb it. Two, by providing environmental measurements of the bird cage by means of a piezo vibration sensor, a light sensor, and a temperature sensor, it gives previously-unavailable context to the weight measurements. Three, by means of radio transmission to an Internet-connected server, it allows for all of these measurements to be presented to the user at an interface convenient to them.
Referring now to the drawings, and primarily
Electrical wire 112 passes through a hole in the back shell 102 to power the device with electricity.
Light sensor 302 and temperature sensor 303 are affixed to a mounting plate 101 such that light and temperature readings, respectively, may be taken of the cage's environment.
In the present embodiment, light sensor 302 is a photoresistor of a type known in the art, and temperature sensor 303 is a thermocouple of a type known in the art. Both sensors 302 and 303 generate signals correlated to the parameters they intend to measure and transmit those signals to microcontroller 200 for processing.
Piezo sensor 300 is shown affixed to mounting block 111 such that it is able to sense vibrations throughout the device and, through mounting to a bird cage, throughout the cage. The signal generated by piezo sensor 300 is sent to microcontroller 200 for processing, where the signal can be interpreted to ascertain events in the cage corresponding to a bird's movement about the cage. By tracking the number of these events over time, microcontroller 200 can determine how active the bird is.
