Development of Livestock Monitoring Device based on Biosensors for Preventing Livestock Diseases

Outbreaks of highly contagious livestock diseases can cause direct and indirect economic impacts such as lower productivity of cattle farms, fall in tourism in damaged areas and countries, and decline in exports. They also incur tremendous social costs associated with disease elimination and restoration work. Thus, it is essential to prevent livestock diseases through monitoring and prediction efforts. Currently, however, it is still difficult to provide accurate predictive information regarding occurrences of livestock diseases, because existing cattle health monitoring or forecasting systems are only limited to monitor environmental conditions of livestock barns and check activities of cattle by using a pedometer or thermal image. In this paper, we present a biosensor-based cattle health monitoring system capable of collecting bio-signals of farm animals in an effective way. For the presented monitoring system, we design an integrated monitoring device consisting of a sensing module to measure bio-signals of cattle such as the heartbeat, the breath rate and the momentum, as well as a Zigbee module designed to transmit the biometric data based on Wireless Sensor Network (WSN). We verify the validity of the monitoring system by the comparison of the correlations of designed device with a commercial ECG equipment through analyzing the R-peak of measured signals.