A Two-Stage Farmer Assistant for Kidding Detection: Enhancing Farming Productivity and Animal Welfare

Kidding in goats is a highly significant event with major economic implications and strong impacts on the welfare of both the offspring and the mothers. Monitoring the process is extremely demanding, as it is impossible to predict precisely when it will occur. For this reason, the automatic detection of kidding has the potential to generate substantial productivity gains while also improving animal well-being. Artificial intelligence techniques based on accelerometry data have been explored for identifying the event, but these approaches typically rely on data loggers, which cannot trigger real-time alerts or assistance. Embedding detection mechanisms directly into wearable devices enables much faster identification and supports energy-efficient operations. However, this approach also introduces considerable challenges, particularly due to the strict constraints of wearable devices in terms of weight, cost, and battery life. The present work documents the development of a real-time, automatic kidding-detection mechanism in which the detection workload is distributed between the collar and an edge device. System evaluation demonstrated the feasibility of this distributed architecture, confirming that both components can cooperate effectively to achieve reliable detection. The system achieved a Matthews Correlation Coefficient performance of 0.91, highlighting the robustness and practical viability of the proposed solution.