Use of commercial non-invasive sensors for daily monitoring of dairy cattle on experimental farms
Abstract
On both experimental and commercial farms, monitoring animal welfare is an essential part of herd management. While human observation remains essential in facilities that keep and use cattle for experimental purposes, it can be supplemented by the use of data from sensors (accelerometers) developed for the management of livestock on commercial farms. Axel accelerometers (Medria, France) are commercial, non-invasive, low-cost accelerometers, widely used for that purpose. We carried on two studies to validate the outputs of these sensors. These studies show that the detection of activities (ingestion, rumination, movements, rest) by the sensors is accurate and thus, the sensors can be used to monitor individuals during their daily activities, detect anomalies in behaviour and eventually implement actions to correct them if we consider that they are likely to impair health or welfare. Nevertheless, sensor generated data are not usable per se and need to be processed before being analysed for daily monitoring. For that purpose, Farmlife (a software developed by ITK/Medria) allows quick and easy analysis thanks to automatically generated graphs, while AUTOMNE (an application developed by INRAE) provides more detailed information, but requires more complex formatting and analysis. We propose to illustrate the use of FarmLife and AUTOMNE tools, to track animals’ activities and analyze animal behavior in experimental farms.
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