Application of remote sensoring technology for the early detection of bovine respiratory disease

Abstract

Bovine respiratory disease (BRD) is highly prevalent in the postweaning stages of beef production. The innate ability of the bovine to conceal disease severely restricts human care­takers from identifying sick cattle accurately and early in the disease process. This challenge reduces the efficacy of current BRD detection methods while potentially reducing the effec­tiveness of contemporary therapeutic regimens. The Quantified Ag technology (QAg) is a novel automated disease monitoring system designed to collect animal activity and ear temperature to detect outlying conditions among individual animals. Pilot research indicates that the QAg technology can detect BRD two days earlier compared to traditional methods (i.e. human ob­servation) while potentially optimizing the labor efficiency of BRD detection efforts.