How does the MooMonitor detect bovine heats?

Question

I am always interested in Internet of Things applications in agriculture, and I recently read about the MooMonitor on independent.ie. They claim that the MooMonitor can keep tabs on cow health, fertility, and heats.

My question is, how does the MooMonitor keep tabs on a cow being in heat? Is it simply physical comportmental difference from the norm that it is detecting, or is there something else it actually measures, like body temperature? Also, does it take the 3 week cycle into account to help predict when to look for differences in whatever signs it is looking for?

Answer 1

The MooMonitor use accelerometers to monitor the physical activity level of a cow, using their measurements to determine if the cow is in heat or not. It appears that research shows that cows entering estrous become more active than normal.

See Dairymaster MooMonitor: The app for heat detection & results of on-farm studies.

Also see MooMonitor is a real cash cow, which says:

Explaining the MooMonitor, a device that sits around a cow’s neck and uses accelerometers to tell if the cow is in heat, Harty said: “There are lots of jokes that go around the place about alternative uses for it, but basically in order to produce milk farmers need to be producing calves and that’s why the fertility cycle is so important to milk production. There is a narrow window of opportunity that farmers need to get right.

“Believe it or not, we were inspired by the technologies the military put in torpedoes and rockets to hit targets – the accelerometer technology we take for granted in phones today – to quantify cow behaviour. When the cow is in heat they tend to be more active so we have algorithms built in that watch for changes in behaviour.”