Near Field Communication Intelligent Remote Livestock Monitoring System (Nigeria)

Abstract

The continual emphasis on the development of the Nigerian
economy with agriculture as an attendant alternative to the existing
oil driven economy, has made it imperative to mechanize
agriculture. Research has shown that livestock in the farm are
mostly affected by diseases and that the proximity between animals
and humans has made the latter more vulnerable to infectious
diseases of animals. However, building a functional as well as cost
effective miniature device that is capable of remotely detecting
cattle’s health status and location in real-time has been quite
challenging. Hence, this paper proposes an Internet of Things (IoT)
and Near Field Communication (NFC) system for monitoring and
tracking the health status as well as the location of any cattle by
using sensors, and Global Positioning System (GPS) module
respectively. The system implementation was carried out using the
software program to drive the hardware system. Sensors such as
temperature sensor, pulse rate sensor, humidity sensor, and GPS
location sensor interfaced to the Node MCU microcontroller with
embedded ESP8266 Wi-Fi chip. This Wi-Fi chip serves as an (IoT)
gateway for sending data to a remote server from where farmer’s
get notification about the health and location of their animals. The
test carried out shows that the developed system is flexible, reliable
and capable of monitoring cattle remotely. The system can also be
deployed in a farm settlement with any kind of cattle production
system in use because of its compact design, affordability, and
complementary support for areas of poor network infrastructure.