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ARS Home » Plains Area » Clay Center, Nebraska » U.S. Meat Animal Research Center » Genetics and Animal Breeding » Research » Publications at this Location » Publication #397597
Research Project: Identifying Genomic Solutions to Improve Efficiency of Swine Production

Location: Genetics and Animal Breeding

Title: PigV2: Monitoring pig vital signs through ground vibrations induced by heartbeats and respirations

Author
item DONG, YIWEN - Stanford University
item CODLING, JESSE - University Of Michigan
item Rohrer, Gary
item Miles, Jeremy
item SHARMA, SUDHENDU - University Of Nebraska
item BROWN-BRANDL, TAMI - University Of Nebraska
item ZHANG, PEI - University Of Michigan
item NOH, HAEYOUNG - Stanford University

Submitted to: Workshop Proceedings
Publication Type: Proceedings
Publication Acceptance Date: 11/6/2022
Publication Date: 1/24/2023
Citation: Dong, Y., Codling, J.R., Rohrer, G.A., Miles, J.R., Sharma, S., Brown-Brandl, T., Zhang, P., Noh, H. 2023. PigV2: Monitoring pig vital signs through ground vibrations induced by heartbeats and respirations. In: Proceedings of the ACM Workshop on IoT and Sensing for Agriculture and Food Systems, November 6, 2022, in Boston, MA. p. 1102-1108. https://doi.org/10.1145/3560905.3568416.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3560905.3568416

Interpretive Summary: Monitoring heart and respiration rates in sows during late gestation and lactation provides important information about their health status. In addition, both heart and respiration rates significantly increase during parturition. We have developed a method to continuously monitor the vital statistics of sows in farrowing stalls using sensors attached to the flooring. Accuracy of predicted statistics were comparable to accuracies of manually collected data. Additional data collection is needed to fine-tune the machine-learned model before the system is ready for commercial application. This system can be developed to sense onset of parturition or adverse health events and send alerts to animal caretakers to provide assistance when necessary.

Technical Abstract: Pig vital monitoring (i.e., estimating the heart rate (HR) and respiratory rate (RR)) is essential to understand the stress level of the sow and detect the onset of parturition. It helps to maximize peri-natal survival and improve animal well-being in swine production. The existing approach mainly relies on manual measurement, which is labor-intensive and only provides a one-time result. Other sensing modalities such as wearables and cameras are developed to enable more continuous measurement, but are still limited due to animal discomfort, data transfer, and storage challenges. In this paper, we introduce PigV2, the first system to monitor pig heart rate and respiratory rate through ground vibrations. Our approach leverages the insight that both heartbeats and respirations generate ground vibrations, from which we can infer vital information by sensing and analyzing. The main challenge in developing PigV2 is the overlap of non-vital information in the vibration signals, including pig movements, pig postures, pig-to-sensor distances, etc. To address this issue, we reduce their influence by first characterizing their effects, extracting their current status, and then reducing their impact by adaptive vital rate interpolation over multiple sensors. PigV2 is evaluated through a real-world deployment with 30 pigs. It has only 3.4% and 8.3% average error in monitoring the HR and RR of the sows.