Author:

Keywords:

Science & Technology, Life Sciences & Biomedicine, Agriculture, Dairy & Animal Science, Agricultural Economics & Policy, Agriculture, precision agriculture, remote monitoring, animal behaviour, animal health, INTEGRATED MANAGEMENT-SYSTEM, BROILER-CHICKENS, RECOGNITION, GROWTH, ALLOCATION, RESPONSES, COUGH, PIG

Abstract:

Livestock production today has to combine several requirements such as food safety, animal welfare, animal health, environment and sustainability in a wide sense. The consequence is a growing need to monitor many variables during the production process. However, the number of animals in a farm has increased so much that visual observation cannot be done continuously during 24 hours a day. One of the objectives of Precision Livestock Farming is to develop the technology and the tools for on-line monitoring of farm animals continuously during their life and in a fully automatic way in order to support the farmer by delivering quantitative information about the animal's status. Animals are responding to their environment with several behavioural and physiological variables. Many sensors and sensing techniques are under development to measure such responses, e.g. by sound analysis, image analysis etc. A major problem is that animals are complex systems, individually different and so called time varying dynamic systems since their behaviour and health status can change at any time. Reliable monitoring tools for such Complex Individual Time varying Dynamic systems (CITD systems) have been developed based on a model that is made while the measurements are done, i.e. in real time. This model calculates an expectation of what the animal will do in the next time steps and this prediction is the basis for monitoring the responses of the individual animal at that time. Examples are on-line monitoring of health status by analysing continuously pig's vocalisations, and the on-line identification of laying hen's behaviour by continuous analysis of 2D images from a top view camera. The technology that is already available and that is under development today can be used for efficient and continuous monitoring systems if the engineering approach is combined with the expertise of ethologists, physiologist, veterinarians. © Wageningen Academic Publishers, The-Netherlands, 2006.