“Monster Wolf” used to scare off bears

Mechanical wolf stands 2.6 feet tall and is 4 feet long

The wild bears were becoming more than a nuisance, lumbering into a small Japanese city on the northern island of Hokkaido in search of food and increasing the risk of deadly encounters with humans.

As bear sightings, and the danger, increased, officials in the city of Takikawa, population 40,000, turned to a mechanical solution.

In September and October, officials installed a “Monster Wolf” near a residential neighborhood and another in a field in a suburban area to keep the wild bears at bay.

The mechanical wolf, originally developed by the machinerymaker Ohta Seiki, stands 2.6 feet tall and is 4 feet long, its maker said. But when planted high in a field, it appears more than a match for a wild bear.

With fake fur, bared fangs and flashing red eyes, the wolf turns its head from side to side and makes howling, screeching sounds when its motion detectors are triggered. The screech can travel about a kilometer, and it comes in more than 60 varieties, including a dog’s bark, a hunter’s voice and gunshots.

That way, bears wouldn’t get used to the sound, according to Shuji Sasaki, director of Wolf Kamuy, the company in charge of the mechanical wolf’s sales and maintenance.

Takikawa’s gambit seems to have been a roaring success, Hiroki Kondo, a city official, said. No more sightings of rummaging bears have been reported since the robo- wolves showed up.

Bear sightings in the wild have reached a five- year high across Japan in recent months, according to official figures. Since April, 13,670 reports were filed. A number of attacks this year have left residents injured or killed, and bears have been shot dead. The recent attacks, including two fatal ones, led to an emergency government meeting last month to tackle the threat, according to local media reports.

Brown bears had been rarely seen in Takikawa — about one every few years — but residents have reported about 10 sightings in the city this year, Kondo said. On Sept. 14, some residents told city officials they could “see a bear from the window” of their home. Three days before, the

more than 15 minutes close together. They discovered it was rarely on the field during games, but often on the sideline.

“We’re able to tabulate that data, and from that information we can help identify people who are close contacts to someone who’s positive,” Klenck said.

Civil rights and privacy experts warn that the spread of such wearable continuous- monitoring devices could lead to new forms of surveillance that outlast the pandemic — ushering into the real world the same kind of extensive tracking that companies such as Facebook and Google have instituted online.

They also caution that some wearable sensors could enable employers, colleges or law enforcement agencies to reconstruct people’s locations or social networks, chilling their ability to meet and speak freely. And they say these data- mining risks could disproportionately affect certain workers or students, such as immigrants living in the country illegally or political activists.

“It’s chilling that these invasive and unproven devices could become a condition for keeping our jobs, attending school or taking part in public life,” said Albert Fox Cahn, executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, a nonprofit in Manhattan. “Even worse, there’s nothing to stop police or ICE from requiring schools and employers to hand over this data.”

Executives at Kinexon and other companies that market the wearable trackers said in recent interviews that they had thought deeply about the novel data- mining risks and had taken steps to mitigate them.

Devices from Microshare, a workplace analytics company that makes proximity detection sensors, use Bluetooth technology to detect and log people wearing the trackers who come into close contact with one another for more than 10 or 15 minutes. But the system does not continuously monitor users’ locations, said Ron Rock, chief executive of Microshare. And it uses ID codes, not employees’ real names, to log close contacts.

Rock added that the system was designed for human resources managers or security officials at client companies to use to identify and alert employees who spent time near an infected person, not to map workers’ social connections.

Oakland University, a public research university near Detroit, is at the forefront of schools and companies preparing to making the leap to the BioButton, a novel coinsize sensor attached to the skin 24/ 7 that uses algorithms to try to detect possible signs of COVID- 19.

Whether such continuous surveillance of students, a young and largely healthy population, is beneficial is not yet known. Researchers are only in the early phases of studying whether wearable technology could help flag signs of the disease.

David A. Stone, vice president for research at Oakland University, said school officials had carefully vetted the BioButton and concluded it was a low- risk device that, added to measures such as social distancing and mask wearing, might help hinder the spread of the virus. The technology will alert campus health services to students with possible virus symptoms, he said, but the school will not receive specific data such as their temperature readings.

“In an ideal world, we would love to be able to wait until this is an FDAapproved diagnostic,” Stone said. But, he added, “nothing about this pandemic has been in an ideal world.”