A distributed infrastructure for veterinary telemedicine

The livestock industry can benefit tremendously from systems that continuously monitor cattle state-of-health, allowing the industry to maintain high meat quality, react to the presence of disease, and predict its spread. Requirements for these monitoring systems are similar to requirements that drive human ambulatory monitoring systems based on wearable sensors and wireless data communication. This paper presents early results from an effort to develop a veterinary telemedicine infrastructure based upon wearable monitoring technology originally developed for home health care. The functional layout of the infrastructure is described, and initial hardware and physiological measurements are presented.