Beyond Production Indicators: A Novel Smart Farming Application and System for Animal Welfare

In the last decade, there has been a growing public interest in the welfare of farm animals. These societal and economic factors have led to the development of smart farming applications, but many important features of animal welfare are either missing or underdeveloped in these applications. This paper proposes a novel smart farming system and application framework with an emphasis on animal welfare features for cows and pigs. The framework is based on concepts of openness, transparency and data sharing for all stakeholders which is stark contrast to other existing systems that are closed, often highly proprietary and almost entirely focused on production indicators. The system is based on a novel computing and sensing framework that integrates cloud and fog computing and deploys an Android-based mobile application called SmartHof. The key innovation in the system is the ability to embrace novel computing architectures, while enabling scalable data sharing, analysis and correlation relevant to animal welfare. We show that our system can be used to improve human-animal interactions as well as enhance social interactions between groups of animals in a farm setting, which is of great benefit not only in the context of animal welfare, but also to consumers, veterinarians and policy makers.