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To achieve labor-saving and highly accurate livestock health management, NARO has led the development of devices designed to be attached to the base of a cow's tail and has developed a multimodal tail-attached wearable device. (See Fig. 1; Reference URL: https://www.maff.go.jp/j/kanbo/smart/forum/R2smaforum/animal/seika71.html)

In this joint study, a collaborative research team from NARO, Azabu University, the Hokkaido Research Organization, Meiji University, and the National Federation of Dairy Cooperative Associations conducted a large-scale field study in which approximately 300 calves were equipped with the multimodal tail-attached device developed by NARO. Analysis of the sensor data revealed that diseased calves tended to show a lower activity level, a longer lying time, and a higher surface temperature than healthy calves. Furthermore, by comprehensively analyzing multiple indicators and applying machine learning techniques, the team developed a disease detection model that could distinguish diseased calves from healthy ones with reasonable accuracy. These findings contribute to the realization of labor-saving and highly accurate health management for calves. In the future, further improvements to this technology, together with integration of the findings obtained in this study with non-wearable sensing systems such as automatic milk feeders and camera-based image analysis, are expected to enhance identification of disease types and improve detection accuracy.