CageDot: Contactless Animal Activity Monitoring System to Follow Infectious Disease Progress

The evolution of technology has paved way for smart and improved healthcare. Invasive and contact-based methods, that have been the gold-standard for healthcare monitoring, are being replaced by contact-less methods to enable engagement-free and continuous remote patient monitoring. These methods are getting more and more popular, not just for humans, but for animals too. In our study, we develop an innovative contact-less monitoring system, CageDot, that uses geophone sensors for tracking animal activities and following infectious disease progress. The activity levels of the animals can act as a surrogate for animal health and help to document illness and recovery with treatment. Our proposed system was extensively tested by performing three multi-week experiments over a period of 1.5 years. The results show that the CageDot system can accurately and continuously track the animal activities and follow infectious disease progress in a non-invasive and contact-free way. This has a significant application and impact in the future drug and vaccine development, because the existing approach relies on daily health check by humans, which is time consuming and not continuous that may potentially skip important events.