Animal Health

Timeline

An animal health diagnostic and record keeping tool for dairy farmers.
Challenge
How might we help farmers easily reach an informed understanding of the state of health of individual animals in their herd?
My Role
UX Design, User Research, Interaction Design, Prototyping, Usability Testing, Visual Design
Year
2022
Timeline
3 Weeks
Tools
Figma
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Herd health feed
Animal health timeline
Health event record
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01

Understand

Context

Cows are stoic animals. They hide injuries to avoid rejection from the rest of the herd. This makes it harder for farmers to notice too, and that delays treatment for the animal and prolongs its suffering.

Halter's solar-powered collar has sensors which detect subtle changes in animal behavior and movements.

Problem definition

Our user problem could be summed up as follows:

Animal injuries and illness can go undiscovered for weeks, delaying medical treatment. This can result in prolonged animal suffering, higher likelihood of mortality, and higher cost to the farmer.

Discovery

Our team made several important realizations.

  • Collar sensor data - Halter's collars continuously collect valuable information from the collars
  • Machine learning - Sensor data can be analyzed in real time to identify possible illness or injury
  • Farmer records - Farmers record animal health events in notebooks, on whiteboards, and in WhatsApp messages
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02

Gain confidence

Ideate + Iterate

Initially, we released a product which displayed the hour-by-hour activity level of each animal.

This proved to be too granular, which made it hard to identify clear changes from day to day.

After a first release of the health timeline, we iterated. In the next release, we moved toward showing activity data in a day-by-day breakdown.

This made it much clearer when a single animal's behavior changed significantly from one day to the next.

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03

Polish

Finished designs

Our finished product seamlessly brought together several important things.

  • Likely injury or illness event health alerts
  • A meaningful and intuitive display of animal activity data
  • A means of recording past and current health events
Herd health feed
Animal health timeline
Health event record
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