Much in moo: Chip to check cow’s health

Parveen Arora

Tribune News Service

Karnal, May 17

Scientists of the National Dairy Research Institute (NDRI), Karnal, and the Indian Agricultural Statistics Research Institute (IASRI), New Delhi, have developed a software to keep track of the health of animals through animals’voices.

“The dairy industry is faced with a lot of problems, including inaccurate detection of estrus (heat), calf pneumonia, other diseases and the physiological condition of animals,” said Dr AK Srivastava, Director, NDRI.

“The scientists have achieved around 75 per cent success in the project to overcome these problems and are likely to achieve their goal in the coming days,” he added.

“NDRI Principal Scientist and Livestock Research Centre in charge Dr SS Lathwal, along with IASRI scientists, initiated a research on ‘bioacoustics as measures of animal welfare’ in February 2013, which will be completed on January 31, 2016,” he added.

Acoustic sensing, being animal friendly, might prove a better and reliable tool for animal monitoring in both organised and unorganised herds, he said. Voice variations in animal could be categorised as one among animals and another within an animal.

The first one could be utilised for recognition of individual animal, while the second one could be used for monitoring their conditions such as hunger, oestrus and sickness, he added.

About the working of the software, Lathwal said, “A chip tied around the neck of the animal records vital information through its voice and relays it to a computer, where the information is monitored for keeping a record of the animal. The data is then analysed through an algorithm.”

“It is assumed that animals express their feelings, emotions, needs and desires in various ways such as through utterance (vocal signals) and other behavioural responses. The vocal signals uttered by animals consist of a number of acoustic features such as pitch, amplitude, energy, resonance frequency, formants and many others, which may show either qualitative or quantitative or both types of variations,” he said.

The new software would assist in providing up-to-date information about the health of animals, he added.