Hungry Birds at Universeum

“IoT is the future for Universeum and the society we operate in. We searched a trusted partner in this area and Cybercom was our choice. We believe in innovative solutions and Cybercom’s Innovation Zone proved that they had the expertise and creative mind to put IoT into production in our environment,” says Håkan Sigurdsson, Project Leader Universeum.

Universeum is one of Scandinavia’s most visited science centers and one of the biggest tourist attractions is Sweden. With a mission of fueling young mind’s curiosity with knowledge in science, technology and mathematics, they came to Cybercom´s Innovation Zone with a challenge to bring their well known rain forest and tropical ecosystem into the age of Internet of Things (IoT).

Every bird needs to eat which means that they regularly visit the feeding stations spread around the rain forest. By equipping every bird with RFID tags and adding sensors to the feeding stations Universeum can monitor feeding patterns of their birds in a non-immersive way. A nice side effect of this is that Universeum can present digitized information about the flock to visitors can to enhance their experience.

Our contribution is a key part of the rain forest daily maintenance, removing the time consuming task of manual counting and observations of the birds. Universeum proudly showed the solution at SVT program Djursjukhuset in national Swedish TV

Managing and growing a tropical indoor forest in the center of Gothenburg is just as hard as it sounds. How do you ensure animals are treated in a good way and how do you minimize ecosystem impact while maximizing the experience of the visitors? My team figured out how to solve a very specific challenge – how do you keep track of the well being and status of Universeum’s flock of rare and endangered birds?