RUMBA - Digital network for the health and welfare of farm animals

Context and challenges

For example, GPS, RFID or accelerometer technologies allow for real-time monitoring of animal conditions on commercial farms. For other technologies such as "omic" measurements, the acquisition costs have decreased significantly, which makes it possible to carry out more frequent measurements. As a result, these new technologies have opened up new horizons for both animal science research and commercial applications for non-invasive measurements related to animal health and welfare. The possibilities of measuring and generating alarms for prevention or early detection could help to meet certain societal expectations related to animal welfare and the rational use of medication on farms.

These technologies also raise new questions. For example, the calibration of new measurement methods is often based on more traditional diagnostic methods that may be very imperfect, which may in turn raise questions about the definition and quality of the reference measurement. Another type of question of interest concerns human decision-making based on information generated by algorithms, which may be the indication of the occurrence of events, with or without uncertainty; or continuous score values. Many other issues related to measurement devices and processing methods of the generated information exist.

Objectives

Rumba aims to develop research projects on the use of digital tools to improve the health and welfare of farm animals, by bringing together scientists, specialists and stakeholders interested in the different facets of these issues. This general objective can be subdivided into different sub-objectives:

1. To create a forum for discussion for scientists, specialists and stakeholders with knowledge in the following fields: animal husbandry, animal welfare and health, data collection systems in animal husbandry, signal processing, data analysis and modelling
2. To bring out the scientific questions and needs in the field related to animal welfare and health that digital technologies could answer
3. To identify the methodological barriers limiting the use of digital technologies in animal husbandry

Species concerned

Partnerships

• Joint research unit BIOEPAR, SA division
• Joint research unit MoSAR, joint research unit PEGASE, UMR-H, UMR IGEPP, PHASE division
• Joint research unit MaiAGE, MATHNUM division
• External partners: Research institutes, universities and schools (data processing, statistics and bio-computing): INRIA, Univ. Paris Saclay, IRISA; Technical institutes: IDELE, IFIP, ITAVI
• Foreign partners: Univ. Luke, Univ. Leuven, Ufaw, Roslin institute, Univ. College Dublin