Non-Invasive Sensor Technology for the Development of a Dairy Cattle Health Monitoring System

Amruta Awasthi,Joseph Walsh,Anshul Awasthi,Daniel Riordan

doi:10.3390/computers5040023

Amruta Awasthi, Joseph Walsh + Show 2 more

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https://doi.org/10.3390/computers5040023

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Abstract

The intention of this research is to establish a relationship between dairy cattle diseases with various non-invasive sensors for the development of a health monitoring system. This paper expands on the conference paper titled “Sensor technology for animal health monitoring” published in the International Journal on Smart Sensing and Intelligent Systems (s2is) for the proceedings of International Conference on Sensing Technology (ICST) 2014. This paper studies and explores particular characteristics of dairy cattle’s health and behavioural symptoms. The aim is to consider the nature of the diseases a cow may have and relate it with one or many sensors that are suitable for accurate measurement of the behavioural changes. The research uses ontological relationship mapping or ontology matching to integrate heterogeneous databases of diseases and sensors and explains it in detail. This study identifies the sensors needed to determine illnesses in a dairy cow and how they would be beneficial for the development of non-invasive, wearable, smart, dairy cattle health monitoring system to be placed on the cows’ neck. It also explains how the primary sensors identified by this research can be used to forecast cattle health in a simple, basic manner. The scope of this paper is limited to the discussion about the non-invasive, wearable sensors that are needed to determine the cattle diseases. We focused only on non-invasive sensors because they are easy to install on cows and no training is required for them to be installed as compared to invasive sensors. Development of such a system and its evaluation is not in the scope of this paper and is left for our next paper.

Highlights

This paper expands on the conference paper titled “Sensor technology for animal health monitoring” published in the International Journal on Smart Sensing and Intelligent Systems (s2is) for the proceedings of International Conference on Sensing Technology (ICST) 2014 [1]
This paper presents the methodology used to determine the relevant sensor that may be used to develop a dairy cattle health monitor
The conference paper titled “Sensor technology for animal health monitoring” published in the International Journal on Smart Sensing and Intelligent Systems (s2is) for the proceedings of ICST 2014 describes the diseases of dairy cattle in brief

Summary

Introduction

This paper expands on the conference paper titled “Sensor technology for animal health monitoring” published in the International Journal on Smart Sensing and Intelligent Systems (s2is) for the proceedings of International Conference on Sensing Technology (ICST) 2014 [1].The agriculture industry, including livestock/dairy farming, is crucial to the European economy.The extent of dairy farming throughout the world and Europe has significantly grown in the past few years. The main reason for this development is the competition, market pressure, and a significant reduction in the cost of liquid milk This turnaround has stipulated a major upgrade of technology and equipment to reduce expense, labour costs and simultaneously boost profits [2]. The conference paper titled “Sensor technology for animal health monitoring” published in the International Journal on Smart Sensing and Intelligent Systems (s2is) for the proceedings of ICST 2014 describes the diseases of dairy cattle in brief. It defines what sensors are and why to use sensing on animals, their categories and types [1].

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