ITR: Veterinary Telemedicine - Proactive Herd Health Management for Disease Prevention from Farm to Market

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Andresen AbstractThis project is building sensor net infrastructure to support intelligent, mobile medical monitoring devices that continuously assess state of health in concentrated and distributed cattle herds. Research is conducted to develop and integrate the following areas of information technology: - Receiver systems that manage wireless traffic and prioritize overlapping signal streams. - Scheduling algorithms that adaptively determine where data analysis should occur and which areas require more in-depth analysis.- Algorithms that search for data patterns that may indicate problems.- Security mechanisms that maintain confidentiality of economic data and herd health information associated with individual farms, while providing epidemiological data of statistical validity.- Low cost system components (affordable by farmers and producers who may have tenuous financial stability).- Robust packaging and linking technology for biomedical sensors, GPS receivers, and Bluetooth-enabled devices for survival in difficult environments.The experimental component of the project uses durable, small sensors (e.g., to report animal identity, position, temperature, blood pressure, and other physiological data), with Bluetooth-compliant monitoring stations near cattle congregation points, such as feed bunks and watering troughs. These stations upload data from nearby environmental sensors, Bluetooth-enabled devices with global positioning capability that are worn by the animals, and wearable/remote biomedical sensors. These results are integrated with previous sensor data, weather reports, weather forecasts, infrared camera images, and prior health assessments. The project is developing initial algorithms to perform rapid analysis on local data prior to uploading summary data for the ranch to regional databases so that these data can be correlated with data provided by other producers. Significant findings can then be immediately broadcast to appropriate medical personnel and producers.Monitoring systems will improve the ability of the animal sciences industry to react to and predict disease onset and its epidemiological spread (e.g., mad cow disease, hoof and mouth disease), whether from natural or terrorist events. Trend analysis, information storage, and health prediction lessons learned from this effort will have immediate application to distributed medical systems targeted at assessing and predicting human state of health and the spread of disease in human populations. These networked embedded sensor systems have implications for homeland security, veterinary medicine, the agriculture industry, and in the long term, human medicine and quality of life.