Development And Preliminary Application Of A Mobile Phone Application For Health Scoring Of Dairy Cow Hooves And Teat End

In the dairy cattle breeding industry,mastitis and foot disease are the two most important diseases,there are difficult to diagnose the disease in the early stage,which leads to the more serious condition of dairy cows and elimination,it has a huge impact on the development of the dairy farming industry.Among all hoof diseases in dairy cows,hoof dermatitis has the highest incidence and causes the greatest economic losses.Accurate assessment of the different stages of hoof dermatitis facilitates correct diagnosis and effective treatment of the disease.Dairy cow health monitoring is the most important part of dairy farming,and the accuracy of health monitoring is crucial.The traditional teat end scoring method and laminitis diagnosis method in the pasture have shortcomings such as low diagnostic efficiency,excessive labor intensity,high labor cost,and low safety,which are not enough to meet the needs of the rapid development of dairy farming.Therefore,a new,convenient,efficient and fast auxiliary tool is needed to help the dairy farms carry out the diagnosis and treatment of the health of the teats and hoof bottoms of dairy cows.In this study,a mobile application for cow teat end score and hoof dermatitis diagnosis was designed and developed based on Android smartphone.Adopt native APP development mode,use Java programming language,application framework adopts Spring Boot framework of Java platform,data storage is completed by remote dictionary service(Redis);HTML technology,network proxy server adopts Nginx server,and vue-element-admin framework is used Structure,etc.to realize the front-end and back-end collaboration of mobile applications.We used the mobile phone program to score teat end and diagnose laminitis on 587 Holstein cows in a cattle farm in Harbin,and the results were checked for consistency with the results of artificial eye scoring.The smart phone application consists of seven modules: user information management,scoring operation,record query,data statistics,operation instructions,about us,and background.An external camera can be used to achieve the end score of the cow’s teat and the diagnosis of laminitis,and the smart phone program can automatically record the score/diagnosis results.The smart phone application runs smoothly during use,is highly compatible with external image acquisition equipment,it has clear images,and is easy to score/diagnose.Compared with naked eye diagnosis/scoring,there are some advantages of low labor intensity,high security,high picture quality,and fast transmission speed,etc.However,it also has the following shortcomings:the battery power of the mobile phone makes the scoring/diagnosis operation unable to be performed for a long time,and the environment with weak network signal will affect the diagnosis efficiency.The results showed that there was a high consistency between the smart phone application and the naked eye in the score of the teat end of dairy cows and the diagnosis of laminitis(Kappa value: 0.670-0.866).The health status of the teat end of the dairy herd in this pasture has reached the target level,and about 75% of the cows suffer from laminitis.It takes 3-7 seconds,and the scoring and recording process can be completed on the mobile phone at the same time,which simplifies the operation process of the teat end scoring and the diagnosis of hoof dermatitis,improves the work efficiency of diagnosis/scoring,and the background of the software can automatically collect the scoring time.The image information of the teat end and the sole of the hoof can be used to establish a standard image database of the teat end and the hoof dermatitis at each stage,which can provide data guarantee for the automatic scoring based on artificial intelligence.In conclusion,the use of smartphone application to connect a handheld camera can replace the eye for the scoring of the teat end of dairy cows and the diagnosis of laminitis.