From Recycled End-of-Life Tires to Smart Circular Livestock Infrastructures: Development and Proof-of-Concept Validation of the SenseMat Platform

This study presents SenseMat, a modular sensing infrastructure based on recycled end-of-life tire (ELT)-derived rubber flooring that integrates continuous body-weight (BW) estimation, environmental monitoring and Internet-of-Things (IoT) connectivity into a single structural livestock infrastructure. Designed as a modular engineering platform, SenseMat provides a structural framework that can be extended with additional sensing modules and adapted to different monitoring applications requiring resilient flooring and distributed sensing. The technical feasibility of the weighing module was evaluated through a 51-day proof-of-concept study conducted under commercial buffalo farming conditions, involving two buffalo calves and generating 4872 BW measurements acquired at 30 min intervals. Following a dedicated preprocessing workflow, continuous BW estimates showed good consistency with weekly reference measurements obtained using a professional livestock scale (R2 = 0.975 and 0.948), with mean relative errors of 0.88% and 1.03% and root mean square errors of 2.15 and 3.09 kg for the two animals, respectively. Simultaneously, the integrated environmental module continuously monitored air temperature and relative humidity, suggesting the capability of the platform to provide synchronized environmental information alongside continuous BW acquisition within a unified monitoring framework. These findings demonstrate the technical feasibility of integrating sensing, environmental monitoring and IoT connectivity into recycled ELT-derived livestock flooring, supporting its development as a modular smart platform for continuous monitoring in precision livestock farming. Future validation under larger-scale commercial conditions will further assess its scalability and broader applicability.