Supporting the Development and Adoption of Automatic Lameness Detection Systems in Dairy Cattle: Effect of System Cost and Performance on Potential Market Shares

Most prototypes of systems to automatically detect lameness in dairy cattle are still not available on the market. Estimating their potential adoption rate could support developers in defining development goals towards commercially viable and well-adopted systems. We simulated the potential market shares of such prototypes to assess the effect of altering the system cost and detection performance on the potential adoption rate. We found that system cost and lameness detection performance indeed substantially influence the potential adoption rate. In order for farmers to prefer automatic detection over current visual detection, the usefulness that farmers attach to a system with specific characteristics should be higher than that of visual detection. As such, we concluded that low system costs and high detection performances are required before automatic lameness detection systems become applicable in practice