Legendairy

A holistic prevention, detection, and treatment system for bovine mastitis, a costly dairy cow disease.  iGEM 2016.

Check out our project wiki:

In 2016 I was the CS/ECE Product Developer and Manager.  I was in charge of redesigning and creating our Cornell Engineering Website and the project wiki as well as the computer science and electrical engineering components of our project.  Below is an overview of the detection system that I created as part of the holistic effort to eradicate bovine mastitis.

Cowscope

Thirty percent of dairy cows will get mastitis in a given year. Perhaps the most costly symptom of this disease is the heightened somatic cell count that occurs in the milk the cow produces. Per thousand-gallon tank of milk, below a certain concentration of somatic cells, farmers get paid a premium. Above a certain concentration, the milk is discarded onto the grass and the farmer loses all that milk, money and time. However, detecting the high cell count proactively is currently very difficult because farmers have to send samples into labs to assess the counts in their milk, costing valuable time and money. 

One of the most common ways lab technicians take a somatic cell count is through direct microscopy of a stained sample. They count the cells on a hemocytometer slide and send the results back to the farm.

What if instead, farmers could take a somatic cell count quickly, easily, and cheaply on the farm? I thus created Cowscope, a 3D printable microscope designed with farmers’ feedback that utilizes the smartphone camera to capture images on a cellular level at 375X magnification. The cost of printing the Cowscope is only around $15, and is designed to be light and sturdy for mobility around the farm. Open your camera within our Cowscope App, and the app will use photo-recognition and the same parameters the lab technicians use to count the nuclei and get a fast, accurate somatic cell count. No more wasted milk or time, and detecting the disease is easier and more efficient than ever before.

The idea for Cowscope was six months in a making, an endeavor that I took on as part of a larger project to better prevent, detect, and treat bovine mastitis around the world. I did the research, interviews and prototyping, while my subteam as a whole coded the accompanying smartphone application that not only counts somatic cells, but also logs farmers’ data to identify trends in cow and herd health. The application also has a feature to help the farmers better quantify the individual value of cows pre- and post- infection in order to increase the economic efficiency of the farm.

More research and information regarding the Cowscope idea is included below.