# A Smart Sensing System of Water Quality and Intake Monitoring for Livestock and Wild Animals
## 4 Experiment Results  
The system was deployed in Tucumcari, New Mexico, in the summer of 2020. Two individual systems were placed on both the east side and the west side of the remote station. The system records the drinking events in terms of date, time, water temperature, and initial and final depth of water level. Sensor data and animal behavior data are collected every two weeks. The system senses the animal visit each time at the drinking station and records the water intake. The water intake is then calculated by the difference of the distance sensor readings using the water consumption estimation equation. Animal identifications were captured using both the RFID system and the motion camera system. Water temperature is also recorded. The water turbidity sensor was not enabled and would be added in the later experiments. The main components of the system--animal identification, water intake measurements, and water temperature sensor--are working as expected. The current consumption of the system is 150 mA. Average watering behavior trends and individual animal drinking behavior data were collected and analyzed. The detailed experiment results are presented below. The water intake is measured by the water level using the distance sensor. Due to the fluctuation of the water level, each reading of the sensor may not accurately reflect the real water level. Therefore, the system samples the water level multiple times during each drinking event. Statistical methods were used to estimate the actual water level. Figure 12 shows the box plot with errors of the distance sensor readings over time. Only the average water level from multiple sensor readings was recorded in the SD card as the final data, while other readings were discarded in order to save the total data size. The water level estimation is done automatically in the Arduino microcontroller. The plot shows that the average distance of the water level increases, which means the water level is moving away from the fixed sensor due to water consumption. The total sum of the data from the water intake measurement system agrees with the data collected from the flow meter which measures the total water consumption. The water intake sensor works together with the animal identification sensor to monitor each drinking event of an individual animal. Figure 13 demonstrates individual water intake per animal and Figure 14 plots the number of visits of each animal that was recorded daily. Data from five days were illustrated. It took approximately two days for  
Figure 12: Statistical box plot of the water level sensor readings. the calves to become accustomed to drinking out of the system, with 1.24 average visits on the first day of the study versus 3.07 average visits per animal by the fifth day. Each individual cow is labeled a specific animal ID, which was plotted using different colors in the figure. Figure 15 shows the average of the water intake and visits of all animals. As watering behavior is a key component to overall water intake for the individual animal, such data generated from the system can not only measure actual water consumption, but can also be used for important watering behavior which may associate with the animal growth and other health-related issues. Figure 14: Recorded visits of the drinking stations by each individual cow. Figure 13: Recorded water intake data by each individual cow. During a drinking event, the motion detector triggers the camera to take pictures. Figure 16 shows example pictures recorded by the camera and stored in the SD card. The pictures are used along with the RFID system to identify the individual cow. Each cow has an RFID tag attached to its ear. The animal ID is also marked on the ear tag. Although the RFID reader can automatically detect the ID, sometimes it misreads it, so it still needs help from the camera systems to identify the animal manually. Figure 16a shows a successful example that the animal ID can be read from the camera.