Identifying-and-counting based monitoring scheme for pigs by integrating BLE tags and WBLCX antennas

Abstract

Recently, the Internet of Things (IoT) technologies have been applied to pig monitoring. Among these, electronic tags help identify individual growing-finishing pigs. Nevertheless, the tags are insufficient to achieve accurate and reliable monitoring in pigsties. Instead, advanced processing data for individual behaviors, such as visit times in the feeding and resting areas and the number of movements between these areas, are required. Numerically measuring the movements of individual pigs in the pigsty is a precondition for obtaining these data. This paper proposes a monitoring scheme of a large herd of pigs for individual identification and counting. As a technical solution, a monitoring system is developed using Bluetooth low-energy (BLE) tags and wireless broadband leaky coaxial cable (WBLCX) antennas. The monitoring system collects access data transmitted from the BLE tags attached to individual pigs. Then the monitoring scheme estimates the location and movement of each pig by computing the collected data. A series of experiments was conducted to evaluate the detection characteristics between the BLE tags and the WBLCX antennas and to show their performances. In addition, the effectiveness for the proposed area-determination algorithm and the monitoring system was verified by field experiments on a pig farm in Japan. Our experimental results are summarized as follows. First, data comparisons between the area-determination algorithm and visual inspections confirmed the validity of the proposed monitoring scheme. Secondly, by the monitoring scheme, the area movements and the dwell times of pigs in a pigsty could be investigated. From the experimental results, the use of the proposed monitoring is expected to be able to observe the locations and movements for large herds of pigs in the pigsty. This paper proposes a monitoring scheme based on identifying and counting of individual pigs, explains the details of the monitoring scheme on the basis of hardware configurations, and verifies its effectiveness and feasibility via experiments.