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mOOvement’s new activity monitoring spots sick or stray animals days before symptoms appear. Using accelerometer data from solar-powered GPS ear tags, it delivers real-time Not Moving and Abnormal Activity (High/Low) alerts. Paired with an interactive activity graph that benchmarks each animal against its own history and the herd average, extensive farmers can catch health issues or lameness at a glance, cut labour costs, and make data-driven decisions from any device, even without cellular coverage.
For years, livestock monitoring technology has focused on answering a single question: Where are my cattle? While knowing the location of your herd is valuable, it is only the starting point. The real opportunity lies in understanding what your cattle are doing and how they are performing.
mOOvement’s latest activity monitoring feature moves beyond simple tracking to provide a continuous, behavioural profile of every animal. By analysing movement data from solar-powered ear tags, producers can now detect subtle changes in behaviour that signal illness, injury, or stress long before these issues become visible to the human eye. In extensive grazing systems, where daily inspections are impractical and labour is stretched thin, this shift from passive location tracking to active performance management is a game-changer.
What the New Activity Monitoring Feature Delivers
The ear tag’s accelerometer continuously detects movement. If an animal has not moved for a specified period, the system triggers a "Stopped moving" alert directly in the mobile app.
Beyond simple movement detection, mOOvement’s algorithms analyse activity levels against historical baselines to generate two distinct alerts:
These alerts provide a critical early-warning system. Research shows that ear-tag accelerometers can detect subtle behavioural shifts that reliably predict estrus, with precision of 0.967 and recall of 0.917 in grazing trials. Mapping day-to-day behavioural baselines per animal and detecting departures from those baselines allows latent events like illness or heat to be inferred without intrusive instrumentation.
The mOOvement app includes a sophisticated activity graph that allows farmers to visualise and compare movement data across multiple dimensions.
The graph shows the animal’s activity over the selected period (e.g., the last 24 hours) as a solid dark blue line. A lighter blue line overlays the previous period’s activity for direct comparison. This enables farmers to instantly spot deviations from normal patterns and assess whether an alert represents a sudden change or a gradual trend.
A second graph view compares the individual animal’s activity (solid line) against the herd activity (light blue shaded area). This is invaluable for:
How It Works: The Technical Foundation
No 4G/5G plans are needed, only the antenna requires an internet connection through a homestead router, 4G/5G sim card, or satellite internet.
Extensive grazing runs on thin margins and long distances. Labour is the binding constraint, and every trip across the paddock carries a real cost: diesel, hours, vehicle wear, and the opportunity cost of the person doing the driving. Activity monitoring changes the economics of that equation. Instead of inspecting everything on a schedule and hoping nothing was missed, you check the animals that need checking, when they need it.
- Early Disease Detection
Detects subtle behavioural changes days before visible symptoms.
- Reduced Labour Costs
Eliminates the need for daily visual inspections of large herds; diesel and labour savings add up quickly.
- Improved Animal Welfare
Enables prompt intervention for sick, injured, or distressed animals.
- Breeding Decisions
Objective activity data supports better bull selection and herd fertility management.
- Peace of Mind
24/7 monitoring from any location, even remote properties without cell coverage.
Knowing where your cattle are is useful. Knowing how they are performing is what changes the operation. mOOvement's activity monitoring takes the same ear tag that tells you where an animal is and turns it into a continuous behavioural record one that surfaces the Not Moving alert, the abnormally high and low activity alerts, and the graph views that let you compare an animal against its own history and against the herd.
For extensive farmers, the value is not the data itself. It is what the data lets you do: act on day one instead of day four, send the vehicle somewhere specific, and spend less time confirming that nothing is wrong. That is the difference between tracking cattle and managing them.
Ready to see it in action? Explore the mOOvement platform and discover how data-driven cattle management can work for your farm.
