Monitoring the sausages from Casa Tarradellas

Lately at thethings.iO, we have been working on several interesting projects. And finally we can announce one of our favourites and related to the science world! Keep reading if you want to know more…

DISCLAIMER: This is an April’s fools 2016 post. Hope to see this happen in the next 5 years

Internet connected sausages

The most well-known Spanish sausage company is called Casa Tarradellas, located 100km from Barcelona. We were approached by them to connect the Tarradellas’ fuets to the Internet with thethings.iO.

Problem that we solve

Casa Tarradellas approached us when they needed more information about their customers. Actually they don’t understand how they customers eat “fuet”, how fast the sausage is eaten, and how many have been never eaten. These questions only can be answered connecting to the Internet the proper sausages and sending the information to the Internet. After that, thethings.iO IoT dashboard was able to monitor and analyze all the parameters from customers behaviours.

First problem that we found is that we can find any kind of sensors in several places all around the world. Nevertheless we needed a biosensor that could fit in the sausages. The biosensors have became one of the most interesting improvements in the field of sensing. After getting one of them, we started thinking of all the amazing things we could track with it. And the answer came fast: the monitoring of how people eat the typical catalan well-known sausages “fuet”.

How it works

Partnering an American company (sorry but we have to still keep the secret of which one we are referring to) and Sigfox, together we were able to provide one of the smallest nano chips we have ever connected to the Internet via Sigfox with our Sigfox SDK. See what it looks like:

Placing several of these biosensors inside the “fuet” we were able to understand the behaviour of Tarradellas customers. We monitored the biochemical process of the digestion, in order to track how people consume this kind of sausages. And we obtained some really interesting analytics that could be really useful to a big brand such as Casa Tarradellas.

Unbelievable, right? See how the technology and biology worlds are changing the 1st of April!