Temperature and ID at the press of a button!

Bio-Thermo™ - the NEW way to take a pet's temperature...

In addition to offering a unique numerical identity, Bio-Thermo™ now also provides you with an instantaneous temperature recording accurate to 0.1 degree F or C.

This revolutionary breakthrough in technology incorporates a temperature detecting biosensor and an identification device all in one chip. Pocket or Pocket EX readers purchased within the last two years can simply be reprogrammed and you can check on animal's temperature at the press of a button.

• Less stressful to the vet, pet and client than taking rectal temperature.
• Multiple temperature readings can be taken with no stress to the patient.
• Ideal for monitoring temperature during and after surgery where minimal disturbance is desired.
• Monitoring of animal health, wellness and breeding cycle.

Does Bio-Thermo™ give an accurate temperature reading?
Although Bio-Thermo™ is implanted subcutaneously in the shoulder region, the correlation of the temperature with the traditional rectal reading is excellent.`
Subcutaneous temperatures do react slightly differently to rectal temperatures in response to certain stimuli.
Stress and exercise raise the subcutaneous temperature (approximately 1 - 2 degrees), quicker than rectal, but both equalise within a few minutes. This is due to the increased peripheral blood flow in the shoulder / neck region.

 

Chip for animals adds temperature sensing to ID capability
CRAIG GUSTAFSON
Associated Press

SOUTH ST. PAUL, Minn. -Ten years ago, Randy Geissler placed a computer chip in his father's hand. Encased in a tiny glass tube, it wasn't much bigger than a grain of rice.

Geissler's father, a dairy farmer from Chippewa Falls, Wis., stared incredulously at it. "What are you going to do with that?"

A decade later, Geissler says he often answers a different question: "What can't you do with that?"

Today those chips - developed by Digital Angel Corp. in South St. Paul - are implanted in more than 30 million pets, livestock and fish worldwide, providing instant electronic identification.

Now Digital Angel is poised to take the next step - chips that will not only identify an animal but begin to tell how it feels. Earlier this year, Digital Angel won USDA and FDA approval to market the Bio-Thermo microchip, which gauges an animal's body temperature. The company looks ahead to future biosensor chips that track an animal's hormonal changes, blood pressure and, eventually, disease.

"The idea is to unlock what's inside, essentially give them voices to tell us how they feel," Geissler said.

For example, a farmer with a large hog operation could implant a Bio-Thermo microchip in each of his animals. Whenever the hogs make a stop at a water trough, a computer identifies each by its chip and records a temperature. If any unusual readings arise, the farmer could remove that animal from the rest of the herd and check for illness.

Production on the Bio-Thermo chip began earlier this month. It will be available for pets in the United States by June, then expand worldwide, becoming available for livestock next fall.

It's a similar business plan to the one Geissler used for his company's ID chip, which is marketed under several different names, including Home Again. The chip, which has reunited many lost pets with their owners, can also be used by farmers to track livestock. And the U.S. government buys it to monitor salmon.

The tiny, glass tube - with a microchip and antennae inside - is inserted just beneath an animal's skin much like a vaccine injection. Its electronic circuitry operates only when it's scanned by a handheld device, which emits a low-frequency radio signal to activate the chip.

The Bio-Thermo chip works the same way, except it transmits more information. Geissler likens it to a software program upgrading from 7.0 to 8.0.

"The product will talk back from inside the body of the animal and will say 'Hey, I'm Fluffy and my body temperature is 101 degrees Fahrenheit,'" Geissler said.

The device could mean veterinarians wouldn't have to wrestle with scared animals using a rectal thermometer. And pet owners who were already willing to pay for the ID chip would get an added feature for the same price, though they would have to bring their pet to a vet or buy a scanner - which Digital Angel doesn't currently market - to check the temperature.

The company doesn't disclose the price of the chip, but spot checks with veterinarians showed them running about $40 to $55, with a smaller additional fee to register the chip in a database.

The market for electronic identification of livestock is potentially large, said Neil Hammerschmidt, chairman of an animal identification committee for the National Institute of Animal Agriculture, a livestock industry trade group.

Hammerschmidt led a task force last year that cited electronic ID as a possible part of a plan to cope with potentially catastrophic diseases, such as hoof-and-mouth. But he noted that implantable devices compete with simple eartags that can include an electronic chip for as little as $2.

Digital Angel is already looking to expand to other physiological functions.

In the future, Geissler says a biosensor chip could help control or eradicate deadly disease, such as foot-and-mouth and mad cow. He concedes that the most problematic diseases are difficult or impossible to detect without a brain tissue sample. "But those are the kind of magnitudes of diseases that we could control if we can find a way to measure what's inside the body of an animal with this little, tiny miniature device."

While disease diagnosis may be decades away, Digital Angel and veterinarians are optimistic about the type of information an implantable microchip could transmit.

Timothy Metcalf, a veterinarian at Eagan Pet Clinic, said: "There are some breeds that are just predisposed to diseases. Could it monitor for abnormal enzymes that might indicate a cancer? A chronic-disease process? Wouldn't that be nice as opposed to exploratory surgeries or ultrasounds or MRIs?"

Metcalf said he's been a proponent of the ID chip since its debut, although he has concerns about the accuracy of a chip to measure temperature.

The ID chip was met with similar concerns, Geissler said, but won over skeptics with the relative ease of its application and its success in reuniting owners with pets.

Digital Angel began in 1945 as Fearing Manufacturing, a St. Paul-based company that made plastic ear tags for livestock. The business took a nosedive in the mid-1980s as it invested heavily in insecticide enhancements to its ear tags.

In 1987, Geissler, a then 26-year-old Fearing employee, and his partners bought the financially strapped company and assumed its debt. "I came home from work and told my wife we were in debt for life. I couldn't even pay my Target bill," he said.

He shut down all insecticide research and focused on marketing Fearing's staple product - ear tags. Three years later, the debt was gone and profits were strong again. In 1993, Fearing bought Destron, a struggling Boulder, Colo., company doing research on microchips. The new Destron Fearing Corp. recorded heavy losses as it introduced its pet ID chip in the United States. By 1997, profits were high again.

Today, the company is named after its latest product, a wireless GPS pager to track people. And it's coming off a year in which it lost nearly three times its $33 million total revenue, due mostly to a writedown to conform to new federal accounting rules.

Geissler says his growth strategy is to take core businesses, grow them to profitability and then invest in a new technology. He did it with ear tags, then microchips, and now will try it with Digital Angel.

"What I try to do is build the next technology off the cash flow of the previous technology," he said. "You just kind of keep building those blocks on top of each other. And when you get all done with it, you have a lot of technology, a lot of significant patents ... and a heckuva business."