SocialCattle: IoT-Based Mastitis Detection and Control Through Social Cattle Behavior Sensing in Smart Farms

Effective and efficient animal disease detection and control have drawn increasing attention in smart farming in recent years. It is crucial to explore how to harvest data and enable data-driven decision making for rapid diagnosis and early treatment of infectious diseases among herds. This article proposes an IoT-based animal social behavior sensing framework to model mastitis propagation and infer mastitis infection risks among dairy cows. To monitor cow social behaviors, we deploy portable GPS devices on cows to track their movement trajectories and contacts with each other. Based on those collected location data, we build directed and weighted cattle social behavior graphs by treating cows as vertices and their contacts as edges, assigning contact frequencies between cows as edge weights, and determining edge directions according to contact spatial-temporal information. Then, we propose a flexible probabilistic disease transmission model, which considers both direct contacts with infected cows and indirect contacts via environmental contamination, to estimate and forecast mastitis infection probabilities. Our model can answer two common questions in animal disease detection and control: 1) which cows should be given the highest priorities for an investigation to determine whether there are already infected cows on the farm and 2) how to rank cows for further screening when only a tiny number of sick cows have been identified. Both theoretical and simulation-based analytics of in-the-field experiments (17 cows and more than 70-h data) demonstrate the proposed framework’s effectiveness. In addition, somatic cell count (SCC) mastitis tests validate our predictions as correct in real-world scenarios.