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| The Lely use conductivity meters on each quarter to determine whether or not mastitis is present. It is not perfect, sometimes it will give false positives. But any cow that shows up as high conductivity needs to be manually checked for mastitis.
As far as sick cows, the robots offer some great tools. Each cow has a tag that measures activity (pedometer) and rumination minutes. We check the rumination minutes on fresh cows daily, if they don't start to climb or climb and then start to fall, you need to check for ketosis. The rumination minutes will usually start dropping a day before production starts to drop. The milk temperature is also recorded at each milking so you can see if she has a fever. There is also a scale, so you can track her body weight. But these are just tools to go along with the general observation of each cow. Robots will not replace the need for daily observation of each cow, it just helps us pick up on issues earlier than we did in the past.
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robotic milkers
