The Pig Cough Monitor in the EU-PLF project: results and multimodal data analysis in two case studies

Precision Livestock Farming (PLF) combines the principles of process control technology with animal sciences. An example of PLF is the Pig Cough Monitor (PCM), which performs a continuous automated measurement of porcine respiratory health through sound analysis. This paper provides results and a thorough analysis of the data obtained in the course of the FP7 EU-PLF project. Earlier work has demonstrated the effectiveness of the PCM in a real-world farm setting. This paper reports on 2 new case studies, again using the cough index as a principal measure. Additionally, the heat map is introduced as a new visualisation approach of cough behaviour. The heat map shows the course of cough throughout the day. Additional sources of metadata such as the corresponding slaughterhouse data are also included. For both cases discussed in this paper, anomalies in the respiratory health are apparent from the cough index representations.