The performance of mobile devices' inertial measurement unit for the detection of cattle's behaviors on pasture

Over the past decade, the Precision Livestock Farming (PLF) concept has taken a considerable place in the development of accurate methods for a better management of farm animals, as Precision Agriculture has done for crop production. Mass consumption mobile devices have nowadays the possibility to record accurately user movements with their Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU). We used iPhone 4S to detect accurately cattle behaviors such as grazing and ruminating with the aim of performing a precision grazing management on the near future. Results showed accuracies ranging between 84% and 100% when detecting these two major behaviors by analyzing recorded raw signals in the time-domain. Ongoing research tries to link these behaviors to different pasture characteristics and performs a refined signal processing analysis for a better monitoring of some possible behavioral changes.