Monitoring of farm animals with Wireless Sensor Networks

The presentation will detail an adaptation of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) to cattle health monitoring. The solution facilitates the requirement for continuously assessing the condition of individual animals, aggregating and reporting this data to the farm manager. There are several existing approaches to achieving animal monitoring, ranging from using a store and forward mechanism to employing GSM-based techniques; these approaches only provide sporadic information and introduce a considerable cost in staffing and physical hardware. The goal of this solution is to overcome these drawbacks by using alternative cheap, low power consumption sensor nodes capable of providing real-time communication at a reasonable hardware cost. Both the hardware and software have been designed to provide a solution which can obtain real-time data from dairy cattle whilst conforming to the limitations associated with WSNs implementations.