Livestock Health and Movement Monitoring
A collar that classifies animal behaviour from motion data and flags changes that often precede illness, transmitting over long range radio and running for months on one battery. Power budget is the dominant constraint and shapes every other decision.
Advanced
Needs a team, real planning, and a supervisor who knows the area.1 semester, 2 to 3 students
5 to ship
3 optional extrasSuggested stack
What you should ship
- Collar device recording accelerometer data with on-device behaviour classification
- Behaviour classes including grazing, ruminating, walking and lying, validated against observation
- Power budget analysis with measured consumption per subsystem and projected battery life
- Long range transmission of behaviour summaries rather than raw data, with a documented duty cycle
- Dashboard showing per animal behaviour patterns and alerts on significant deviation from an individual baseline
If you have time left
- Solar or kinetic energy harvesting to extend deployment
- Position tracking for grazing distribution across a field
- Correlating detected behaviour changes with recorded veterinary events
The problem
Illness in livestock shows in behaviour before it shows in obvious symptoms. Reduced rumination and changed activity precede visible signs by a day or more, which is enough time to matter, and no farmer can watch every animal.
What you build
A collar with on-device classification, a power efficient radio link, and a dashboard that alerts on deviation from each animal's own baseline.
The constraint that drives everything
Power. The device must run for months on a battery that an animal can wear, which rules out streaming raw sensor data and forces classification on the device with only summaries transmitted. Every design decision follows from this, and a measured power budget per subsystem is one of the most valuable things in your report.
Validation without a farm
You need ground truth, which means observing animals and recording what they were doing while the device logged. Arrange access to a farm or veterinary school early, because this is the dependency most likely to sink the timeline.
Why per animal baselines
Animals differ. A fixed threshold for daily rumination time will flag naturally quiet animals constantly and miss changes in active ones. Comparing each animal against its own recent history is what makes the alerts usable.
Scope warning
Behaviour classification and alerting. Not a herd management system, and not automated veterinary diagnosis.
Ideas and guidance, not finished projects
These are project ideas and scoping guidance, published free for students to use as a starting point. I do not build, write, or sell final-year projects, and I do not complete coursework for anyone. Take an idea, make it yours, and build it.
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