Monitoring the movement of housed animals by means of wireless technology

Abstract

Currently, several, more or less, suitable means for detecting, identifying and monitoring the position of housed animals exist. However, these means suffer from various limitations, which could be eliminated with regard to the current technical and technological possibilities. One possible solution could be the use of some wireless technologies from the Internet of Things (Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Zigbee, etc.). The uninterrupted supervision of individual housed animals would bring important information about the daily routine of individuals and then, based on the deviations from this daily routine, the opportunity to derive their physical and mental state from these deviations would be potentially possible. This article presents a proof of concept of a low-cost monitoring system of the movement of housed animals. The proposed system is able to detect the client's (prototype's) position in the space by means of Wi-Fi (IEEE 802.11 standard) and received signal strength indication (RSSI) technologies. A fingerprint method and a triangulation method of analysing the space are used to calculate the position in space with a resulting accuracy within metres of the real position.