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

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The goal of this project is to research and develop a prototype,technology-rich infrastructure to support economical continuous monitoringof cattle state of health via remote and wearable devices that interactwith a veterinary health information network. Wireless stations,distributed databases, and physiological assessment algorithms will play akey role in this environment. These systems are improving the ability ofthe livestock industry to react to and predict disease onset and itsepidemiological spread, whether from natural or terrorist events. Trendanalysis and health prediction lessons learned from this effort haveapplication to human state-of-health prediction and disease spread inhuman populations.The researchers are placing Bluetooth-compliant monitoring stations nearcattle congregation points, such as feed bunks and watering troughs. Thesestations upload data from environmental sensors, Bluetooth-enabled deviceswith global positioning capability worn by the animals, andwearable/remote biomedical sensors. Local algorithms perform rapid dataanalysis prior to uploading ranch summary data to regional databases,where the data is correlated with information provided by nearbyproducers. Significant findings are then immediately broadcast to regionalveterinarians, producers, and authorities. In order to accomplish this, the research addresses a number of important information technology issues, including scheduling algorithms that adaptively determine where data analysis should occur and which areas require more in-depth analysis; prioritization algorithms for multiple wireless data streams with near-real-time constraints; and area-appropriate data mining techniques to find problem indicators.The interdisciplinary project is addressing a critical need within the agriculturaland national communities: applied research that allows the animalsciences industry to react to and predict disease onset in cattle and itsepidemiological spread. Through the development of a distributed softwareinfrastructure, a comprehensive physiological monitoring toolset, and newprocessing algorithms (e.g., for data storage, fusion, andinterpretation), we are helping to improve the financial stability of thelivestock industry while simultaneously raising our level of preparednessfor epidemiological disasters, whether from natural or terrorist events.