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RFID or NLIS identification records has tremendous potential to serve as a foundation for additional records that are of value to provide better decisions for industry operators.
Lifetime data such as breed, sex, property of origin, date of birth, etc could be linked to individual animal identification records.
Pre-export treatments or other measures may also be recorded, such as disease testing, vaccination, application of treatments antibiotic, anthelmintic, parasiticide, etc, animal
movements and measures such as body weight, condition score, etc.
Morbidity and mortality records and cause of death can be recorded against individual animal identification records.
An aggregated dataset could then be analysed to look for associations between any possible measures sex, breed, treatment, origin, movements, time of year, etc and
complex interactions between these measures and defined outcomes such as mortality due to specific causes or morbidity.
The benefit of this information for exporters is making better decisions about selecting animals and managing animals during preparation for export transport to assembly depot,
treatments or vaccinations, etc to lower morbidity and mortality risk and improve performance and profitability.
10 Development of a shipboard application
10.1 Background
In the planning stages of this project there was interest in development of systems that would allow capture of animal health data onto a hand-held device or laptop during the
voyage. Members of the project team had had earlier experience during LIVE.123, where a customised database application had been developed to allow data entry via a laptop during
the voyage. During that project the system functioned by having project team members collecting information on paper based records or in notebooks while inspecting animals or
performing post mortems and then entering data and information into the database in the team member’s cabin.
After initial consultation with industry stakeholders during the first months of this project a decision was made to develop paper-based data recording forms as the major form of data
collection during the project. All existing data and information recording systems used by AAVs and the regulatory reporting systems at that time daily and end of voyage reports
were based on paper reports. There was little general industry support for a centralised database driven system that might be capable of being managed on a laptop and possibly
on hand-held devices.
A decision was also made to explore options for development of a prototype information management system IMS that would be trialled during the latter stages of the project
– a
shipboard application shipboard app. The purpose of this objective was to test feasibility and practicality of options for use of hand held devices and design of software. The scope
was limited to feasibility testing that would inform a final report section on options for devices
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and software applications that might be considered for future development. In part this limitation recognised the fact that full development of a read-to-use product would be risky,
because stakeholder acceptance would not be guaranteed and the costs associated with producing a ready-to-use product were considered to be higher than the allocated budget.
10.2 Development approach
