Digitally assisted monitoring technologies on farms for precision management of animal health and welfare

Project summary

Both for indicators of animal welfare and of animal health, monitoring (groups of) animals over time is becoming increasingly important. Modern animal welfare concepts focus more on positive and dynamic aspects of welfare and on supporting the adaptive capacity of animals. Therefore, relevant animal-based measures of health and welfare indicators need to be monitored over time to come to a meaningful assessment at individual or group level. The technical possibilities for automatic monitoring of farm animal health and welfare are developing rapidly. Approaches where vision and/or sound monitoring systems are used hold great promise, as they provide a non-invasive way to monitor health, welfare, specific behaviours and potentially even affective state of farm animals. To date, however, development of practical tools for health and welfare monitoring on commercial farms is still limited. The newly started Eyes & Ears project, an internal project of the European Partnership on Animal Health and Welfare (SOA 34), aims to facilitate the identification, development and validation of such on-farm surveillance tools. The project includes 20 partners from 11 EU countries and will start by reviewing and describing the current technologies that are available for both vision and sound monitoring systems and collecting existing and new datasets. For both vision and sound, we will work on well-defined cases across animal species (including ruminants, pigs, poultry and fish). Here, we also plan to make use of the wealth of approaches and data in some species (for instance: computer vision in cattle) to apply these approaches in other species. In the next step of the project, we plan to develop a dedicated pipeline for analysis of the data coming from the vision and sound monitoring systems, translating the data into relevant information for the farmer. This will be done by applying machine learning techniques. Farmers and other stakeholders will be invited to participate in the decision process about information needed. At this stage, we will focus on a limited number of cases (across species) that are already closer to commercial application. Finally, the project also plans to develop education and training materials that can be used by a wide range of stakeholders interested in developing tools for automatic on-farm monitoring of animal health and welfare. The Eyes & Ears project aims to contribute to easy-to-use technologies to enable precision management of animal health and welfare on farms.