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

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.