Lame, in many ways

Lameness is a hard-to-detect, important swine health and welfare concern that causes considerable economic losses due to additional labor, repeated treatments, euthanasia, early culling, and (re)production losses. 

• Although it’s a recurrent condition in swine production systems, identification can be unreliable due to lack of individual pig observation and standard evaluation criteria. However, in order to prevent financial losses and welfare problems, detection must be early and accurate, and treatment is essential. 

The most common method to evaluate lameness is visual scoring, which is easy and cheap to implement, but it is time and labor intensive, not to mention being prone to errors. Therefore, automated lameness detection may be a more accurate approach for intensive swine production systems.

• Smart swine farming is the application of engineering techniques to monitor, model, and manage pig production by increasing the farmer’s ability to maintain contact with individual pigs and thus prevent health, welfare, and management issues.

In order to have a commercially suitable automatic identification system for lameness onset, future larger scale studies are necessary and, even though the digital video-based tracking system is accurate, inexpensive, and reliable, further captured data, more measurements and especially delicate software are needed to have a robust system for the farm environment.