Farm Health Monitor app for iPhone and iPad

Farm Health Monitor is a smartphone tool designed to allow veterinarians, producers and farm managers to immediately report symptoms of disease (syndromic reporting) as and when they see it in the barn. Anonymatized Syndromic surveillance is extremely important for two reasons. The first is that many production limiting diseases go unreported and the industry has no idea of what diseases are circulating in the industry and therefore what impact this may have on production. Knowing the incidence and the extent of a problem will also allow industry to more accurately assess the cost of production limiting diseases and how that might affect cost of production for industry as a whole.

Secondly, because syndromic surveillance is immediate, any proliferation of disease is recognized early which enables industry to immediately start to look at preventative measures. If we wait until there is accurate diagnosis by laboratory before acting (current situation) we could be many days into the disease spreading, making it harder to control.