A Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) Based System for Livestock Tracking and Localization

The ubiquitous Internet of Things (IoT) technologies have advanced in livestock production and management. This paper describes design and implementation of low cost Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) IoT solution for management of farm animals, which can count, identify, and localize animals in the farm. It is aimed at enhancing livestock welfare and production. The solution uses wearable animal collar and central devices capable of communicating information pertaining to specific animals to a central BLE device. Collected data is analysed and displayed locally to a user. Therefore, we report the development process of the solution, experiments on the technology and results. In addition, we show the feasibility of the solution in a case study undertaken managing sheep and goats at Dedan Kimathi University of Technology farm, dairy section and future advancements on the solution for monitoring other parameters such as activity using machine learning and scaling.