Artificial Intelligence (AI) is an inherently smart technology that has now been utilized in agriculture offering herders a cost effective way to detect and control lung disease in cows.
For vets, disease detection has always been a daunting task especially in herds containing millions of cattle. Ranching; the practice of raising cows or other cattle in herds, is fastest growing agriculture sector and has been affected the most.
A lack of smart veterinary strategy followed by limited anit-microbials had caused massive loss to the rural economy in the past where many cows suffering from a Bovine Respiratory Disease (BRD) lost life.
Recently, a team of engineers from Flex livestock intelligence in collaboration with a US veterinarian – Merck Animal Health, came up with a smart idea of detecting cows with BRD leading to cost saving for herders in calling veterinary help and use of anti-microbes.
Named WHISPER, the AI powered solution can save 10-43% of anti-microbials use in cattle.
WHISPER© on arrival.
In animal health, a data analytics based technology solution is called ‘Precision animal health technology’. WHISPER is such a technology driven solution that has been tested at US ranches and comes out as a practical solution for monitoring individual animals.
The solution is a wireless sensor-device that sticks on a cow and collects four types of data necessary for a diagnosis of BRD. These four data elements are; sounds of heart, sounds of breath, body temperature, and body weight.
A computer tablet could then be used, that installs WHISPER machine learning algorithm, to fuse the data into a single feature for BRD classification. Feature of individual cows are then matched with already trained data with labels as BRD and non-BRD.
The outcome of the machine learning algorithm is a decision of “Treat” or “Do Not Treat”.
WHISPER further saves cost and time by suggesting herders to use application for only those animals that are apparently under medium to high risk of developing Bovine Respiratory Disease (BRD).
These groups are those which: have traveled long distances, have been kept in wet and cold weather for longer periods, or have unknown history of vaccination.
The small water-proof cutout could be washed with water and needs to be cleaned regularly over the cow.
The device uses Supervised Learning
Supervised learning is an AI algorithm that matches a feature with already trained labeled data to reach a decision. Since identifying disease is apparently a classification problem, therefore supervised learning is best suited for the case.
Given that sound recordings for BRD are not available in huge datasets, so the engineering solution relies on a just-enough dataset size for supervised learning applications.
“As the dataset grows, we will always be looking to see what additional tools can come into use.” said Udi Cohen, Head of Global R&D, Merck Animal Health Intelligence Technology Labs.
WHISPER © on Arrival is to see more features in future, as AI is expected to advance in animal health, where the device would be further developed to detect a variety of other cattle diseases.
