Surface electromyography measurements for ingestive behaviour identification on goats

Abstract

Monitoring grazing ruminants ingestive behaviour has applications in measuring animal welfare, animal diseases detection and animal production system modelling. Current monitoring methods are mostly laborious, time expensive or invasive. In this work, it is presented a non-invasive method for chewing activity identification on goats by masseter muscle surface Electromyography (sEMG). Short-term chewing/resting time and chewing count were successfully predicted on male goats comparing to visual observation.