Pregnancy detection and monitoring in cattle via combined foetus electrocardiogram and phonocardiogram signal processing

Background Pregnancy testing in cattle is commonly invasive requiring manual rectal palpation of the reproductive tract that presents risks to the operator and pregnancy. Alternative non-invasive tests have been developed but have not gained popularity due to poor specificity, sensitivity and the inconvenience of sample handling. Our aim is to present the pilot study and proof of concept of a new non invasive technique to sense the presence and age (limited to the closest trimester of pregnancy) of the foetus by recording the electrical and audio signals produced by the foetus heartbeat using an array of specialized sensors embedded in a stand alone handheld prototype device. The device was applied to the right flank (approximately at the intercept of a horizontal line drawn through the right mid femur region of the cow and a vertical line drawn anywhere between lumbar vertebrae 3 to 5) of more than 2000 cattle from 13 different farms, including pregnant and not pregnant, a diversity of breeds, and both dairy and beef herds. Pregnancy status response is given “on the spot” from an optimized machine learning algorithm running on the device within seconds after data collection.