Accelerometer based solution for precision livestock farming: Geolocation enhancement and animal activity identification

Abstract

The rapid evolution of electronics and communication technologies in the last years has contributed to the expansion of Precision Livestock Farming applications. In this context, animal geolocation systems applied to extensive farming are interesting for farmers to optimize their daily work organization. Nevertheless, the deployment of these solutions implies several technical challenges which must be resolved, mainly the energy consumption and the suitability of the communication protocols. A recently developed solution that deals with these technical challenges is the e-Pasto platform, which is composed of low power geolocation devices embedded into collars that offer an energetic autonomy of at least seven months, completed with a visualization user interface. The autonomy is assured employing a duty-cycle operation that results in one geolocation position measurement per hour. This work studies the employ of accelerometers to overcome this limitation assuring, at the same time, the required autonomy for the geolocation device. The authors also propose an algorithm that processes the acceleration data in order to identify the steps of an individual. The whole solution (step identification and geolocation) has been validated by means of several experimental tests.