preprints.org > engineering > bioengineering > doi: 10.20944/preprints202007.0652.v1

Preprint Article Version 1 Preserved in Portico This version is not peer-reviewed

Version 1 : Received: 26 July 2020 / Approved: 26 July 2020 / Online: 26 July 2020 (17:58:26 CEST)

Animal welfare remains a very important issue in the livestock sector but monitoring animal welfare in an objective and continuous way remains a serious challenge. Monitoring animal welfare based upon physiological measurements instead of audio-visual scoring of behaviour would be a step forward. One of the obvious physiological signals related to welfare and stress is heart rate. The objective of this research was to measure heart rate (beat per minutes) on pigs with technology that soon will be affordable. Affordable heart rate monitoring is done today at large scale on humans using the Photo Plethysmography (PPG) technology. We used PPG sensors on pig’s body to test whether it allows getting reliable heart rate signal. A continuous wavelet transform (CWT)-based algorithm is developed to decouple the cardiac pulse waves from the pig. Three different wavelets, namely 2^nd, 4^th and 6^th order Derivative of Gaussian (DOG, are tested. We show results of the developed PPG-based algorithm against electrocardiograms (ECG) as a reference measure for heart rate and this for an anesthetized versus a non-anesthetised animal. We tested three different anatomical body positions (ear, leg and tail) and give results for each body position of the sensor. In summary, it can be concluded that the agreement between PPG-based heart rate technique and reference sensor goes from 91 to 95 percentage. In this paper we showed the potential of using the PPG-based technology to assess pig’s hear rate.

Pig’s Heart Rate; Photoplethysmography (PPG); Continuous Wavelet Transform (CWT); Motion Artefacts

Engineering, Bioengineering

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