Artificial Intelligence for Automatic Monitoring of Respiratory Health Conditions in Smart Swine Farming

Abstract

Porcine respiratory disease complex is an economically important disease in the swine industry. Early detection of the disease is crucial for immediate response to the disease at the farm level to prevent and minimize the potential damage that it may cause. In this paper, recent studies on the application of artificial intelligence (AI) in the early detection and monitoring of respiratory disease in swine have been reviewed. Most of the studies used coughing sounds as a feature of respiratory disease. The performance of different models and the methodologies used for cough recognition using AI were reviewed and compared. An AI technology available in the market was also reviewed. The device uses audio technology that can monitor and evaluate the herd’s respiratory health status through cough-sound recognition and quantification. The device also has temperature and humidity sensors to monitor environmental conditions. It has an alarm system based on variations in coughing patterns and abrupt temperature changes. However, some limitations of the existing technology were identified. Substantial effort must be exerted to surmount the limitations to have a smarter AI technology for monitoring respiratory health status in swine.

A Comprehensive Monitoring System for Health Status and Behavior of Pigs Under Different Environmental Conditions Using Vision and Audio Technologies

“…The number of coughing sounds or the severity of the respiratory disease might not be enough for the alarm to turn on. There is also a possibility that the differences of ReHS between groups might be due to population size difference since the technology was designed for large pig populations [26]. The result found that the ReHS and the CF have a strong negative association.…”

“…AI product that can automatically detect and monitor the respiratory health status of pigs using sound technology is available in the market, the SoundTalks (SoundTalks NV, Leuven, Belgium) [26]. Several studies evaluate its applications in swine farming and show advantages over conventional method of health monitoring [27][28][29][30].…”

“…On the other hand, in the new system, coughing sounds are quantified and converted into metric values from 0 to 100 (the higher the ReHS values, the higher the health condition of the pigs) [31]. There were limitations found on the previous system such as variability of RDI values and the alarm system is population-dependent [26]. Therefore, there is a need to evaluate the new system in the field condition.…”

An Internet of Things-Based Cluster System for Monitoring Lactating Sows’ Feed and Water Intake

“…With the further development of deep learning, intelligent cameras and recording devices have begun to be used in pig farms. They play an important role in disease monitoring [51], behavior monitoring [52], and video-based weight estimation [53]. The collection and storage of unstructured data such as video and audio also face challenges.…”