Acoustic Real-time Sensor for Ingestive Behaviour of Grazing Cattle

DENIZ, NESTOR N.; KLER, PABLO A.; MARTINEZ RAU, LUCIANO; GIOVANINI, LEONARDO L.; CHELOTTI, JOSÉ O.

San Fernando del Valle de Catamarca

Congreso; IX Congreso de Microelectrónica Aplicada; 2018

Universidad Nacional de Catamarca

The increment of food market requirements and competitiveness makes that industry needs more accurate sensing and monitoring tools. Due to the large temporal dynamics necessary to monitor some animal behaviours, the autonomy and storage capacity of the devices involved becomes critical.In this work, we introduce a device specifically developed for on-line monitoring, quantifying and recording the feeding patterns of dairy cows. The prototype consists of an embedded circuit that records and analyzes the sounds produced by the animal to detect, classify and quantify the events related with the feeding behaviour. It implements an algorithm recently developed, which was adapted for its execution in a microcontroller based embedded system. A microcontroller with power management technology, combined with high efficiency harvesting power supply and power management firmware, enable long-term operation. The technology presented within this publication is protected under international patent application PCT/IB2016/057627.