New feature in the app: acitvity alerts are saving cow lives
Introducing Activity Insights for your animals. All collars are now equipped with an activity classification model. This model uses sensors onboard the product to understand whether your animals are lying down or standing still, grazing, walking or running.
This data is the foundation for several new features in the app that will help you monitor animal behavior more easily and give you the tools to act fast if something is out of the ordinary.
The features we are launching are:
- Motionless collar alert
- Daily activity charts
- Decreased activity alert
- High activity alert
Motionless detection
You’ll now receive an alert if a collar becomes completely still. The alert triggers if a collar falls off an animal, letting you know quickly that the animal is no longer fenced. You can see where the collar is located in the app, find it and reattach it to the animal.
The alert is only triggered if the collar was recently in use on an animal and then becomes still for at least 20 minutes. Animals that are resting or standing still won’t set off the alert, as there are still small movements that indicate everything is normal.
Activity charts
The app now displays the animal’s daily activity and the average daily activity for all animals on a fence. The activity charts show movement patterns over time and help you spot changes in activity patterns on an individual level or compared to the herd.
Activity can change for many reasons. Moving to a smaller field or bringing animals indoors often reduces activity, while larger pastures tend to raise it. When feed is scarce, animals may travel farther and show higher activity. Weather also affects behavior: rainy days often lower activity across the herd. If one animal’s activity drops while the rest remain steady, it may signal sickness or lameness. If one animal shows higher activity while the rest stay normal, it may indicate that the animal is in heat.
Decrease activity detection
This feature monitors the amount of time an animal spends laying or standing. If this number increases significantly it could indicate that the animal has health issues.
Our algorithm compares the still time of the last 24 hours to the still time for the last two weeks and calculates a cumulative sum of increased deviations from the stilltime. This means that the algorithm will detect significant sudden increases, but also small increases for multiple consecutive days.
This is a tool to help you detect sickness in your animals. When the decreased activity alert triggers we recommend checking in on your animal.
First hand experience
Many of our customers have already seen the value of this new feature in action. Just a day after it was launched, one farmer received an alert about unusually low activity from one of the collars. When they went out to check, they found the cow had fallen into a deep bog and was completely stuck. “One of the Monil collars alerted us that the cow had unusually low activity. We went out right away, and thanks to the collar’s GPS position, we went straight to the cow that had fallen into a hole in the bog,” the farmer told us.
“It was very well hidden, and without the collar we probably never would’ve found the animal—at least not alive!” This alert came just in time.
High activity detection
You’ll now also get an alert if an individual animal’s activity suddenly increases compared to its usual pattern. We compare the past three days of activity to detect changes in the animal’s daily rhythm. These changes might be a sign that the animal is in heat.
This is our first step toward reliable heat detection. As we gather more confirmed cases and feedback from you, we’ll improve the model to make these alerts even more accurate.
Feedback
We’ve added a feedback option to help us improve activity insights and alerts, so let us know if our predictions matched what you saw in the field. This way, we can refine the algorithms and make the features more useful and reliable.
