Interpretive Summary: Toward smart health monitoring: multimodal sensing and intelligent disease diagnosis in poultry and livestock

By: Juncheng Ma, Xiao Yang, Yu Liu, Peiguang Xin, Qin Tong, Chao Liang, Ligen Yu, Aiqiao Liu, Chaoyuan Wang

Implications

• Multimodal sensing provides valuable data and knowledge for intelligent disease diagnosis.
• Intelligent disease diagnosis is evolving from text-based understanding toward multimodal fusion and knowledge-driven reasoning.
• Future efforts should prioritize devices for definite disease diagnosis and diagnostic frameworks integrating prescription generation for intelligent decision support.

Introduction

Health management of livestock and poultry production is critical for ensuring food safety, animal welfare, and production sustainability. Farm scales expanded rapidly in China over the last two decades. For example, the capacity of a single laying hen house increased from thousands to hundreds of thousands. Large-scale farm typically refers to an annual slaughtered volume of >100,000 birds or >50,000 pigs. As such, the prevention and control of animal diseases have become increasingly complex. For instance, African Swine Fever (ASF), which can have a mortality rate of up to 100%, exemplifies the devastating impact of animal epidemics. The largest ASF outbreak in China in 2018 led to the death of 43.46 million pigs, causing an estimated US$14.5 billion in indirect economic losses (You et al., 2021). However, many poultry and livestock farms often suffer from limited diagnostic infrastructures and professional expertise. Veterinarians are usually responsible for multiple farms, which may increase the risk of cross-infection and substantial economic loss. In addition, the shortage of licensed veterinarians further increases the difficulty of timely health management (Yang et al., 2025). Recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and smart sensing offer promising solutions and enable automated health monitoring and intelligent diagnostic systems, which marks a crucial step toward the digital transformation of livestock health management.

Read more in Animal Frontiers: From Isolated Data to Integrated Ecosystems.