“…Near-continuous observation of preparturient mares is extremely labour-intensive, and time requirements would be markedly reduced with automated monitoring systems. In cattle, automated monitoring and alert systems are used for oestrous detection (Chanvallon et al, 2014;Pennington, Albright, & Callahan, 1986;Roelofs, van Eerdenburg, Soede, & Kemp, 2005) and health management (Borchers, Chang, Tsai, Wadsworth, & Bewley, 2016;Müller & Schrader, 2003) and are also increasingly advocated for monitoring of cows before calving (Krieger et al, 2017;Marchesi et al, 2013;Ouellet et al, 2016). Monitoring devices in cattle are often made for long-term recordings and are fixed permanently on the animal whereas for birth alert, pedometers (Nishimura et al, 2017;Titler et al, 2015) or intravaginal sensors (Palombi et al, 2013) are used.…”