Mobile Platform for Livestock Monitoring and Inspection

Livestock keepers acquire and manage information (e.g. identification numbers, images, etc.) about livestock to identify and keep track of livestock using systems with capabilities to extract such information. Examples of such systems are Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) systems which are used to collect and transmit livestock’s information to host devices. Sophisticated RFID readers are very expensive, and more functional than the cheap ones whose use are mostly limited to reading and transmission of tag IDs. Cross-platform mobile applications will allow monitoring of livestock irrespective of the platform on which mobile devices are being operated. Farmers’ secured access to records via web services is not limited to a device as they can login on any mobile device with the installed application. In this work, a mobile platform which consists of a cross-platform mobile application, webservice and database is developed to cost-effectively manage and exploit records of livestock acquired using a cheap RFID reader. The mobile application was developed using a Xamarin form framework. The programming language and development environment used are C# and Visual studio respectively. Records of livestock were acquired, posted, updated, deleted and retrieved from the database via a web service. Additional advantages offer by the solution implemented include, exporting of animals’ records via email and SMS, viewing of animal’s record by scanning their tags or QR code of animals’ passports, and login system to sign users in and out of the application. Development of RFID readers with sensors to acquire health-related parameters for health monitoring is recommended.