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Lookup NU author(s): Dr Stephen Matthews, Dr Amy Miller, Jim Clapp, Dr Thomas Ploetz, Professor Ilias Kyriazakis
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).
Early detection of health and welfare compromises in commercial piggeries is essential for timely intervention to enhance treatment success, reduce impact on welfare, and promote sustainable pig production. Behavioural changes that precede or accompany subclinical and clinical signs may have diagnostic value. Often referred to as sickness behaviour, this encompasses changes in feeding, drinking, and elimination behaviours, social behaviours, and locomotion and posture. Such subtle changes in behaviour are not easy to quantify and require lengthy observation input by staff, which is impractical on a commercial scale. Automated early-warning systems may provide an alternative by objectively measuring behaviour with sensors to automatically monitor and detect behavioural changes. This paper aims to: (1) review the quantifiable changes in behaviours with potential diagnostic value; (2) subsequently identify available sensors for measuring behaviours; and (3) describe the progress towards automating monitoring and detection, which may allow such behavioural changes to be captured, measured, and interpreted and thus lead to automation in commercial, housed piggeries. Multiple sensor modalities are available for automatic measurement and monitoring of behaviour, which require humans to actively identify behavioural changes. This has been demonstrated for the detection of small deviations in diurnal drinking, deviations in feeding behaviour, monitoring coughs and vocalisation, and monitoring thermal comfort, but not social behaviour. However, current progress is in the early stages of developing fully automated detection systems that do not require humans to identify behavioural changes; e.g., through automated alerts sent to mobile phones. Challenges for achieving automation are multifaceted and trade-offs are considered between health, welfare, and costs, between analysis of individuals and groups, and between generic and compromise-specific behaviours.
Author(s): Matthews SG, Miller AL, Clapp J, Plötz T, Kyriazakis I
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: The Veterinary Journal
Year: 2016
Volume: 217
Pages: 43-51
Print publication date: 01/11/2016
Online publication date: 28/09/2016
Acceptance date: 23/09/2016
Date deposited: 17/10/2016
ISSN (print): 1090-0233
ISSN (electronic): 1532-2971
Publisher: Elsevier B.V.
URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1090023316301538
DOI: 10.1016/j.tvjl.2016.09.005
Notes: Open Access funded by Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council. Under a Creative Commons license.
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