Cloud services integration for farm animals’ behavior studies based on smartphones as activity sensors

Abstract

Smartphones, particularly iPhone, can be relevant instruments for researchers in animal behavior because they are readily available on the planet, contain many sensors and require no hardware development. They are equipped with high performance Inertial Measurement Units (IMU) and absolute positioning systems analyzing users' movements, but they can easily be diverted to analyze likewise the behaviors of domestic animals such as cattle. The study of animal behavior using smartphones requires the storage of many high frequency variables from a large number of individuals and their processing through various relevant variables combinations for modeling and decision-making. Transferring, storing, treating and sharing such an amount of data is a big challenge. In this paper, a lambda cloud architecture innovatively coupled to a scientific sharing platform used to archive, and process high-frequency data are proposed to integrate future developments of the Internet of Things applied to the monitoring of domestic animals. An application to the study of cattle behavior on pasture based on the data recorded with the IMU of iPhone 4s is exemplified. Performances comparison between iPhone 4s and iPhone 5s is also achieved. The package comes also with a web interface to encode the actual behavior observed on videos and to synchronize observations with the sensor signals. Finally, the use of Edge computing on the iPhone reduced by 43.5% on average the size of the raw data by eliminating redundancies. The limitation of the number of digits on individual variable can reduce data redundancy up to 98.5%.

Understanding the adoption of smartphone apps in dairy herd management

“…Furthermore, record keeping and evaluation at the cow level are considered to be essential for monitoring herd performance and making effective herd management adjustments if necessary (Barragan et al, 2016). However, shifting from management of the herd as a whole to management of the individual cows within the herd is contingent on the collection and evaluation of data in (near) real time (Debauche et al, 2018).…”

“…For instance, herd management smartphone apps, as a form of decision support tool (DST), can be used to enter and assess cow individual data (Abdelsayed, 2017). Monitoring cows via sensor technology and smartphone apps can provide essential information on their health 9423 or reproductive status as well as their feeding, lying, and moving behavior in real time (Debauche et al, 2018). Sensing technology and real-time monitoring combined with smartphones and associated apps enable a dairy farmer to react faster and allow for improved decision-making in livestock management (Kamilaris and Pitsillides, 2016).…”

Cloud architecture for plant phenotyping research

“…Moreover, we have also validated and tested the scalability and the adaptability of our architecture on different use cases such as cattle behavior, 23 animal' behavior, 24 connected pivot-center irrigation, 26 digital phenotyping, 28 the health of bee hives, 25 and landslides monitoring. 27 European legislation that will be translated into national law will require us to ensure the safety and traceability of the use of the data.…”

“…In the past, our architecture has been progressively developed through different use cases such as cattle behavior, 23 Farm animals' behavior, 24 the health of bee hives, 25 connected pivot-center irrigation, 26 landslides monitoring, 27 and digital phenotyping. 28 In all these use cases, the lambda architectures were used to ingest streaming time series data from the Internet of Things.…”

Measuring Farm Animal Emotions—Sensor-Based Approaches

“…For example, cloud computing provides an optimal storage solution that is far more efficient than analogue or even disc-based data storage. Cloud-based storage can be integrated with smartphone apps to create a highly secure system that stores data, pulls it from the cloud when required, and analyzes it [ 128 ].…”