Precision technologies for mobility scoring dairy herds (PhD)

Lameness in dairy cows has major consequences from both welfare and economic perspective and currently represents one of the highest priority diseases for the dairy industry. Currently, there are no commercially available automatic methods of lameness dectection that reliably detect mild lameness with a sufficient degree of accuracy. New technology provide the possibility to achieve this and therefore the potential to produce huge gains for the industry in terms of lameness reduction.

Aims and Objectives

The aim is to develop new methods to objectively measure lameness in dairy cattle by:

1) utilising existing commercially available sensor technology and

2) investigate the novel use of accelerometer and gryoscope sensors in dairy cattle.