Real-time health monitoring in pigs

In order to improve sanitary control on a farm, the ideal would be, on the one hand, to prevent diseases (biosecurity and vaccination) and, on the other hand, to anticipate diseases. Work is currently underway on monitoring systems for early detection of diseases. By detecting them early, rapid, accurate and individualized treatment can be put in place, thus reducing the impact of the disease and reducing the consumption of antibiotics.

A monitoring system can obtain information from images and bisosensors every second and, through a computer system with predefined patterns, this information can be processed in real time to provide useful information to stockpersons.

This technology makes it possible to monitor the animal’s movement over several consecutive days through the use of accelerometers and artificial vision systems and establishes alerts when these reach relatively low levels.

After four to seven days of infection, an animal begins to make changes in its routines such as reducing movement or reducing playing and/or feeding time. With a real time monitoring system, pigs are monitored by video surveillance and movement patterns are established. When those patterns are altered, the computer system issues an alert of a possible case of animal with fever. The suspect animal is then individually tested to determine whether it does indeed have fever and needs to be treated with an antipyretic, or whether it does not have fever but moves to an individual surveillance system over the next few days.