%402x.svg)
Continuous monitoring of animals' behaviour can give valuable insights into their welfare and health, or production problems. Thanks to our computer vision systems, a huge amount of data is collected and transformed into four basic behavioural variables: eating, drinking, moving, and inactivity. Many research papers indicate that changes in eating, drinking, or moving patterns are usually the first signs that animals are exposed to stressors such as diseases. Therefore, we started calculating health scores on the group (pen) level. The health score indicates how healthy the pen is. When we say “healthy”, we don’t have a specific disease in mind, nor we’re able to provide such data. By “healthy” we mean that the observed behaviour doesn’t significantly deviate from the baseline measures. As baseline, we take observational data from all pens included in rotation and we calculate the “normal” time spent on four basic activities. That means on the first day of rotation we will not show the score. We need to first collect the data.
The score goes from 1 to 10, and is divided into three groups: Poor, At risk, and Good. Poor health score indicates a problem in the pen. At risk means that if the declining trend continues, animals in the given pen might be exposed to a stressor. Good scores indicate that animals' behaviour doesn’t deviate from the expected values. Because of environmental circumstances, such as low or no light during the night, scores take into account activities recorded between 7:00 and 21:00 only.
The Pen health score widget is located on the Pen page. By clicking on “Details”, users can see the scores for individual variables. Health score history is located in the accordion, also on the Pen page, where users can see how the scores oscillated in a given timeframe.
References:
Bus, J.D., Boumans, I.J.M.M., Beest, D.E. te, Webb, L.E., Bokkers, E.A.M. (2024).Exploring individual responses to welfare issues in growing-finishing pig feeding behaviour. Animal, 18 (6)
Bus, J.D., Boumans, I.J.M.M., Engel, J. (2023). Circadian rhythms and diurnal patterns in the feed intake behaviour of growing-finishing pigs. Scientific Reports 13, 16021
Cheng, J., Putz, A.M., Harding, J.C.S. (2021). Genetic parameters of drinking and feeding traits of wean-to-finish pigs under a polymicrobial natural disease challenge. Journal of Animal Science and Biotechnology 12, 105
Lancaster, J. M. (2018). "Utilization of Depth - Enabled Identification and Tracking System to Identify and Track Individual Pigs and Analyse Individual Pig Activity" (2018). Theses and Dissertations in Animal Science. 169
Kapun, A., Adrion, F., & Gallmann, E. (2023). Evaluating the Activity of Pigs with Radio-Frequency Identification and Virtual Walking Distances. Animals : an open access journal from MDPI, 13(19), 3112
Maselyne, J., Adriaens, I., Huybrechts, T., De Ketelaere, B., Millet, S., Vangeyte, J., Van Nuffel, A. and Saeys, W. (2016). Measuring the drinking behaviour of individual pigs housed in group using radio frequency identification (RFID). Animal: An International Journal of Animal Bioscience 10(9), 1557–1566.
The aim of the Today widget is to list the most important events of the current day. It shows the number of treatments and alerts on a pen level. It is located at the top of the Pen page.
As its name suggests, the location preference map shows which areas in the pen animals occupy the most. By default, the map shows the location of the animals in the past hour, and the slider can be used to explore the pen occupancy in the past 24 hours. The current threshold is set to 10 seconds. It means that the animal had to stay in the same spot for at least 10 seconds, in order to be recorded. The more time animals spend on a specific spot, the darker the colour that spot will be. Location preference map can be found on the pen page, in the Location preference accordion.
With this release, the Comparison feature is getting more visibility. Instead of in the bulk menu on the Pen page, Comparison can be found in the left hand side menu. The feature allows the users to compare up to 4 pens by a chosen metric. Six variables can be compared between the pens: eating, drinking, moving, inactivity, daily averages, and health score. Users can also select the time range during which the variables will be compared. The reset button will bring the page back to the default state, removing all pens from the selection and resetting the chosen dates. The camera view is switched off by default, and can be switched on if needed.
So far, it has been possible to schedule feeding or treatment plans for the whole rotation only. The latest update allows users to create feeding or treatment plans for specific pens in a rotation.
The “Next vaccination after” field is removed. Most vaccinations are one-time interventions rather than recurring events. Therefore, the scheduling flow is simplified.
Now, users can zoom into activities using 15 and 30 minutes, hour, and daily bucket. Next to that, users can select a timeframe of interest: for example, I want to see the average time spent on activities in Pen X between 7 and 10 am with the 15mins aggregation.