In collaboration with Betagro, researchers from Carnegie Mellon – CMKL | Thailand, Hae Young Noh and Pei Zhang, have developed geophone-based (vibration) sensors to detect behaviors and sickness of pigs in a noninvasive way.
Normally, on pig farms, “antibiotics” were widely used as they do not only protect pigs from the diseases so effectively, but they are also cheap and safe. However, scientists have discovered that the more pigs get antibiotics, the more they become less effective over time because of drug resistance. Then, once antibiotics stop being effective, one illness may be able to kill an entire stock.
“We had been thinking about animal tracking and animal monitoring for a while, and we noticed that antibiotics is a big issue for animal welfare as they are quickly becoming ineffective due to overuse,” said Noh, an associate professor in civil and environmental engineering. “It’s good to know quantitatively what kind of sickness the animals have.”
Using the geophone-based (vibration) sensors, researchers can monitor pigs’ activities more closely by detecting the vibrations from their footsteps or other motion. Then, researchers analyze how signals of the sensors are related to pigs’ abnormal behavior because understanding pigs’ behavior helps researcher to identify whether the pig is ill or not. Thus, farmers can isolate the sick pigs or administer antibiotics only when the pigs are sick.
Unlike the visual sensors, the geophone-based (vibration) sensors do not require a line of sight or consistent lighting, and the pigs also do not have to wear something that could create discomfort. Moreover, this technology is able to increase farm efficiency such as to check whether all pigs are feeding or whether some baby pigs are unintentionally injured.
The further aim of this research is to optimize the machine learning model, so it will be able to distinguish between pigs with different kinds of illnesses, not just sick pigs and healthy pigs. Furthermore, this technology is considered that it will eventually be used to monitor other animals.
Retrieved from: https://engineering.cmu.edu/news-events/news/2019/08/05-pig-sensing.html
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