Is Continuous Heart Rate Monitoring of Livestock a Dream or Is It Realistic? A Review
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Department of Agricultural Structure and Bioenvironmental Engineering, College of Water Resources and Civil Engineering, China Agricultural University, Beijing 100083, China
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Key Laboratory of Agricultural Engineering in Structure and Environment, Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs, Beijing 100083, China
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M3-BIORES KU Leuven, Department BioSystems, Kasteelpark Arenberg 30, 3001 Leuven, Belgium
*
Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Sensors 2020, 20(8), 2291; https://doi.org/10.3390/s20082291
Received: 3 March 2020
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Revised: 8 April 2020
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Accepted: 15 April 2020
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Published: 17 April 2020
(This article belongs to the Special Issue ECG Monitoring System)
For all homoeothermic living organisms, heart rate (HR) is a core variable to control the metabolic energy production in the body, which is crucial to realize essential bodily functions. Consequently, HR monitoring is becoming increasingly important in research of farm animals, not only for production efficiency, but also for animal welfare. Real-time HR monitoring for humans has become feasible though there are still shortcomings for continuously accurate measuring. This paper is an effort to estimate whether it is realistic to get a continuous HR sensor for livestock that can be used for long term monitoring. The review provides the reported techniques to monitor HR of living organisms by emphasizing their principles, advantages, and drawbacks. Various properties and capabilities of these techniques are compared to check the potential to transfer the mostly adequate sensor technology of humans to livestock in term of application. Based upon this review, we conclude that the photoplethysmographic (PPG) technique seems feasible for implementation in livestock. Therefore, we present the contributions to overcome challenges to evolve to better solutions. Our study indicates that it is realistic today to develop a PPG sensor able to be integrated into an ear tag for mid-sized and larger farm animals for continuously and accurately monitoring their HRs.
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Keywords:
photoplethysmography (PPG); electrocardiography (ECG); photoplethysmographic imaging (PPGI); precision livestock farming (PLF); heart rate monitoring; livestock
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MDPI and ACS Style
Nie, L.; Berckmans, D.; Wang, C.; Li, B. Is Continuous Heart Rate Monitoring of Livestock a Dream or Is It Realistic? A Review. Sensors 2020, 20, 2291. https://doi.org/10.3390/s20082291
AMA Style
Nie L, Berckmans D, Wang C, Li B. Is Continuous Heart Rate Monitoring of Livestock a Dream or Is It Realistic? A Review. Sensors. 2020; 20(8):2291. https://doi.org/10.3390/s20082291
Chicago/Turabian StyleNie, Luwei, Daniel Berckmans, Chaoyuan Wang, and Baoming Li. 2020. "Is Continuous Heart Rate Monitoring of Livestock a Dream or Is It Realistic? A Review" Sensors 20, no. 8: 2291. https://doi.org/10.3390/s20082291
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