STREMODO, ein innovatives Verfahren zur kontinuierlichen Erfassung der Stressbelastung von Schweinen bei Haltung und Transport

Abstract. Title of the paper: STREMODO, an innovative technique for continuous stress assessment of pigs in housing and transport
Vocal utterances of animals are the results of emotional states in specific situations. Therefore, distress calls of pigs can be used as indicators of impaired welfare. An automatic system was developed that responds selectively to stress vocalisations and that registrates and records their amount in the time domain. It can be applied in housing systems, during transports and in abattoirs. The patented technique is based on sequential records of the actual sound events in short time windows (92ms) and a parsimonious coding by 12 complex parameters (LPC-coefficients). A subsequent artificial neural network trained with respective parameters from porcine stress vocalisations is able to detect stress utterances with an error rate of less than 5 % even in noisy stables.