Year: 2003-04

Company: Equigene Research

Liaison(s): Carlo Quinonez

Thoroughbred trainers are interested in assessing the effectiveness of the training regimes of their racehorses. A device that provides trainers with physiological feedback while the horse is exercising on the track would be very useful. A KGI student team is working with Equigene Research to develop the SmartSaddle, a small lightweight device designed to be worn by a racehorse, that will acquire and record data on a horse’s heart rate, speed, gait, cardiac output, oxygen consumption and carbon dioxide production. The student team is assisting in the solicitation of customer feedback with respect to size and weight of the device and is redesigning the prototype to use a microcontroller-based architecture. They are also working to implement a wireless link between remote sensors on the horses’ hooves and the main data acquisition module on the saddle.