A Physiological-Monitoring Electronic Platform for Cattle Grazing Systems

Related Work

The increasing demand for automatize monitoring processes and to provide automatic information in livestock activities has motivated several proposals of technological solutions. There are commercial products such as the Polar Sport Tester, the Polar Equine RS800cx G3, focused on horses to monitor heart beat (Janzekovic, Prisenk, Mursec, Vindis, Stajnko, & Cus, 2010), and devices to monitor cattle location and temperature (Caja, Castro-Costa & Knight, 2016), among others. Livestock managers need information about how and why their animals respond to environmental challenges to make improved decisions on strategies to reduce animal production losses at hot weather. In order to minimize loss, many physiological stress indices are used, such as heart or respiration rate.

Silve et al. (Silva, Arce, Souto, & Costa, 2005) present a wireless sensor network prototype to monitor physiological responses of livestock. They have measured the bovine brain electrical activity by capturing EEG signals. The equipment comprises two modules, one placed on the animal head (animal module) and the other in an observation station (base module).