A health monitoring system for growing-finishing pigs based on the individual feeding pattern using Radio Frequency Identification and Synergistic Control

Alterations in an individual pig's feeding pattern can be warning signs for diseases, environmental issues or other problems, so automated monitoring of feeding patterns can aid farmers in their daily tasks. Using decision support tools to detect any relevant changes in the automatically gathered patterns allows for detection of problems in an early stage preventing economic losses for the farmer and increasing pig's welfare. A High Frequent Radio Frequency Identification (HF RFID) system was used to collect feeding pattern data of growing-finishing pigs. Different variables for quantifying feeding patterns are extracted from these data. These variables are monitored for each individual pig using a Synergistic Control approach. Using the concept of Synergistic Control it is possible to define animal-based threshold values to identify normal and abnormal variation in each pig's feeding pattern, hence implementing an early warning system for individual pigs. Two spontaneously occurring problems with individual pigs (lameness and general illness) were detected by the early warning system, even several days before the clinical signs were present or the pig was recognized as ill by its caretakers.