Abstract-We report first results on developing smart sensor systems for the automatic and frequent collection of animal weight and gait data, under the hostile conditions of a livestock farm. The novelty in our approach is to sense frequently the animals' floor contact, in suitably chosen locations, under natural and unobtrusive conditions. We demonstrate a pilot low profile rubberized mat sensor heads, delivering a large number of plastic optical fiber transmission measurements taken frequently from individual deformation sensors. The acquired data allows gait analysis from guided-path tomography images or by machine learning. We demonstrate weight estimation with accuracy better than 1% over a range suitable for deployment in pig farms.
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