Fog assisted application support for animal behaviour analysis and health monitoring in dairy farming

Abstract

With the exponential growth rate of technology, the future of all activities, including dairy farming involves an omnipresence of widely connected devices. Internet of things (IoT), fog computing, cloud computing and data analytics together offer a great opportunity to increase productivity in the dairy industry. In this paper, we present a fog computing assisted application system for animal behaviour analysis and health monitoring in a dairy farming scenario. The sensed data from sensors is sent to a fog based platform for data classification and analysis, which includes decision making capabilities. The solution aims towards keeping track of the animals' well-being by delivering early warning alerts generated through behavioural analytics, thus aiding the farmer to monitor the health of their livestock and the capability to identify potential diseases at an early stage, thereby also helping in increasing milk yield and productivity. The proposed system follows a service based model, avoids vendor lock-in, and is also scalable to add new features such as the detection of calving, heat, and issues like lameness.