Pressure measurement in the reticulum to detect different behaviors of healthy cows

The aim of the current study was to investigate the relation between reticulorumen contractions and monitored cow behaviors. A purpose-built pressure measuring device was used and shown to be capable of detecting the known contraction patterns in the reticulorumen of four rumen-fistulated cows. Reticular pressure data was used to build a random forest algorithm, a learning algorithm based on a combination of decision trees, to detect rumination and other cow behaviors. In addition, we developed a peak-detection algorithm for rumination based on visual inspection of patterns in reticular pressure. Cow behaviors, differentiated in ruminating, eating, drinking, sleeping and ‘other’, as scored from video observation, were used to develop and test the algorithms. The results demonstrated that rumination of a cow can be detected by measuring pressure differences in the reticulum using either the random forest algorithm or the peak-detection algorithm. The random forest algorithm showed very robust performances for detecting rumination with an accuracy of 0.98, a sensitivity of 0.95 and a specificity of 0.99. The peak-detection algorithm could detect rumination robustly, with an accuracy of 0.92, a sensitivity of 0.97 and a specificity of 0.90. In addition, we provide proof of principle that a random forest algorithm can also detect eating, drinking and sleeping behavior from the same data with performances above 0.90 for all measures. The measurement device used in this study needed rumen-fistulated cows, but the results indicate that behavior detection using algorithms based on only measurements in the reticulum is feasible. This is promising as it may allow future wireless sensor techniques in the reticulum to continuously monitor a range of important behaviors of cows.