Abstract
Measuring the heartbeat and respiration of animals continuously can
provide valuable information about their health status.
Respiratory-related diseases are very common in the poultry industry and
unfortunately, there is no non-contact respiratory monitoring system for
measuring the breathing rate and heart rate of the broiler chicken. In
this letter, we explored and tested the feasibility of utilizing a 24
GHz on-shelf Radar module for monitoring the vital signs (breathing rate
and heart rate) of broiler chickens. A signal processing approach has
been developed to extract vital signs of broiler chicken from
Radar-captured signals. The experiment was carried out on three
different normal broiler chickens with the age of 25-30 days, weight
1.18-1.6 Kg where a 24-GHz radar module was mounted at a distance of 0.2
meters above the chest surface of the chicken, and this particular
experiment was repeated for twenty times. We also used a reference ECG
module (Biopac System) for extracting the breathing rate and heart rate
of the broiler chicken and compared the accuracy of our proposed system.
Experimental results demonstrated that the radar measurement closely
matches the Biopac ECG acquisition module measurement and showed an
accuracy of 96% for a short-scale study.