Using Implantable Biosensors and Wearable Scanners to Monitor Dairy Cattle’s Core Body Temperature in Real-Time

Abstract

Cooling systems can help dairy cows avoid the heat stress that would otherwise reduce milk production and harm the animal’s overall health. However, cow cooling systems can be resource intensive, and the control mechanisms of those systems can become outdated. We believe that controlling cow cooling systems by using “biofeedback, ” specifically the cow’s direct physiological responses to heat stress, to better represent the heat stress status of a dairy cow, would improve the system’s efficiency and effectiveness. An increased core body temperature (CBT) is the quintessential physiological indication of heat stress, one that can directly show the thermal distress level of an individual cow and thus facilitate optimal cooling control. However, the traditional way of measuring CBT intravaginally is not only invasive but also difficult to implement as a real-time, continuous monitoring system. Furthermore, as homeothermic animals, cattle seek to maintain CBT within a narrow normal range, and deviations indicate a problem has already occurred. Therefore, in the study presented, we document the feasibility of using the subdermal temperature occurring at the base of a cow’s ear to reliably represent physiological signs of heat stress. To do so, we designed a network of sensors (including an implantable biosensor, a wearable RFID scanner, and a LoRa gateway hub) that can seamlessly relay temperature data from the biosensor all the way to the cloud server for real-time monitoring that can be viewed on any internet-connected device. In the course of our study, we sought to determine whether the resulting subdermal temperature measurements could reliably predict changes in CBT and thereby indicate the level of heat stress earlier. We also analyzed the data to determine how much the correlation between the biosensor temperature readings and the CBT readings will change in relation to environmental influences. In this report, we describe our methodology in more detail and also the proposed biofeedback-based control system’s potential as an effective and commercially viable way to mitigate the negative physical and economic effects brought on by heat stress.