Monitoring vital signs, such as heart rate (HR) and respiratory rate (RR) is critical for veterinary medicine. The existing contact based systems are difficult to use on animals for longer periods as they may cause movement restriction. Contactless solutions have recently gained more popularity due to their ease-of-use. However, there are very few validated systems for animals. In this study, we propose a contactless vital signs monitoring system, CageDot for animals. Our system provides continuous real-time monitoring of HR and RR during hospitalization. The CageDot is placed under the animal cage and detects the heart vibrations using a geophone sensor. The CageDot also has a signal quality control algorithm to address the problem of obtaining high-quality cardiac data in real-life noisy environments, such as hospitals. Compared to the existing works that use controlled environments, this is especially significant. The algorithm includes several steps that include background noise/movement removal, subject movement detection, heartbeat extraction, and vital signs estimation. The experimental results on 16 hospitalized dogs and cats show that this system can achieve high accuracy for vital signs monitoring with a mean absolute error (MAE) of 4.71 for HR (3.8% error rate) and 1.28 (8% error rate) for RR.

The evolution of technology has paved way for smart and improved healthcare. Invasive and contact-based methods, that have been the gold-standard for healthcare monitoring, are being replaced by contact-less methods to enable engagement-free and continuous remote patient monitoring. These methods are getting more and more popular, not just for humans, but for animals too. In our study, we develop an innovative contact-less monitoring system, CageDot, that uses geophone sensors for tracking animal activities and following infectious disease progress. The activity levels of the animals can act as a surrogate for animal health and help to document illness and recovery with treatment. Our proposed system was extensively tested by performing three multi-week experiments over a period of 1.5 years. The results show that the CageDot system can accurately and continuously track the animal activities and follow infectious disease progress in a non-invasive and contact-free way. This has a significant application and impact in the future drug and vaccine development, because the existing approach relies on daily health check by humans, which is time consuming and not continuous that may potentially skip important events.

Health monitoring is essential for both humans and animals in daily life. While numerous health monitoring systems have been developed, the majority are designed exclusively for either humans or animals, and most require direct physical contact. We have developed BedDot, a contactless health monitoring system for both humans and animals using a seismic sensor. BedDot can be deployed in various environments, such as bed and seat settings for humans, as well as in cages for animals, to monitor occupancy, heart rate (HR), respiratory rate (RR), and blood pressure (BP). Our system demonstrates high accuracy in the clinical experiments of 150 patients and 16 dogs and cats.