Application of precision livestock farming: Challenges and opportunities

This systematic literature review aims to evaluate advancements in sensor systems for detecting health conditions in dairy cows especially on mastitis, fertility, locomotion, and metabolic disorders. Relevant articles published between 2014 and 2024 were identified from Scopus. Each article was categorized by health condition and assigned to one of four development levels: sensor technique (level I), data interpretation (Level II), integration of information ( Level III), and decision making (Level IV). Relevant information from the articles was systematically reviewed and discussed. We identified 132 articles published in the past 10 years, describing a total of 151 sensor systems. Most sensor systems were aimed at mastitis and reproduction, followed by locomotion and metabolic disorders. The far majority of the articles were at level II (data interpretation) presenting research on (novel) algorithms to detect disease. A large number of different statistical or machine-learning or deep-learning models were described and evaluated, amongst others random forests. Level II systems applied statistical analysis or machine-learning/deep-learning models (e.g., random forests, You Only Look Once (YOLO), Support Vector Machine (SVM), or Convolutional Neural Network (CNN)). These algorithms did use a wide range of sensor data. Only few articles aimed at level III research, integration of information and decision support. This review highlights the need for sensor systems research to be driven by real-world requirements for on-farm decision making. To move from proof-of-concept toward practical, future research must integrate sensor outputs with herd records and financial models, validate systems across multiple farms and at higher data frequencies, and embed economic evaluation alongside sensitivity and specificity metrics. Addressing these technical, integration, and economic challenges is essential before sensor systems can fully support automated, value-driven health management on commercial dairy farms.