Dear Colleagues,

In recent years, the interdisciplinary synergy between engineering, medicine, and biology has led to the development of extremely sophisticated clinical devices, monitoring systems and signals analysis. These new tools are being used in different fields of human clinical practice, with evident advantages in terms of comfort (non-invasiveness), efficiency and ease of use. The main target of these devices is monitoring physiological and behavioral parameters allowing the acquisition of accurate information on both emotional state and health status of subjects.

Moreover, in this age of strong global competition, the sustainable production carried out by farms needs to be strongly improved both in terms of efficiency and animal welfare. In this context, real-time monitoring of physical, physiological and mental health of the animals using both “ready to use” technologies and ad-hoc dedicated systems, directly applicable to every day practice by farmers and technicians, is the most demanding and promising challenge to deal with.

Recent studies highlighted how the Autonomic Nervous System parameters and the behavioral changes (i.e., manifestation of acute and chronic pain or evaluation of fear-induced states) can provide concrete information about the emotional and physical well-being of animals, with the consequent impact on livestock production.

It is worth noting that the real-time monitoring of subjects through non- or minimally invasive systems is extremely useful in others application areas, such as in laboratory animals where the determination of the end-point of a trial is fundamental to the well-being of animals. Similarly, another application of these systems can be found in assisted Activities and Therapy with animals, where behavioral and physiological monitoring systems can help to estimate the efficacy of the intervention itself. In these situations, humans and animals play the actor roles in the interaction process and their emotional response is an essential information to be measured.

Innovative papers from different research areas such as biotechnologies, bioengineering, computer science, animal science, veterinary medicine, are invited to contribute to this Special Issue that aims at bring together latest advances of biotechnologies for the management, health and welfare of animals. Interdisciplinary studies will be taken into account, especially ones regarding (but not limited to): 1) long- and short-term body monitoring at individual and/or group level of animals involved in breeding production, laboratory and Assisted Intervention, 2) data analysis of farm activity and laboratory system (measuring physical and behavioral indicators), 3) measuring animal welfare and health as indicator of sustainable production, 4) personalized system for ecological monitoring, 5) dedicated models and data processing algorithms, and 6) novel sensor and system design.

Dr. Paolo Baragli
Dr. Antonio Lanata
Guest Editors

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