iTrim™ is an iPad application designed to assist veterinarians in the field during cattle hoof trimmings, streamlining the process of diagnosis and treatment, as well as saving a detailed history for each animal that can be later exported for analysis.
Currently, trimmers record their diagnoses using pencil and paper. This process is time consuming and potentially unreliable. More importantly, it offers no convenient way of computerising the data collected by each veterinarian in the field, thus making any attempt to analyse the overall patterns of health within a given herd almost impossible. Furthermore, the pencil and paper method does not allow veterinarians working across different herds a simple way to compare past and present diagnoses on the fly.
To address these issues, iTrim™ offers the following features:
• A simple, elegant interface designed and optimized for use in real world farm conditions.
• A log table that displays the history of all trimming events recorded in the application. From this table, the full details of each event, including details about the farm, the trimmer, and all diagnoses for each animal, can be exported as a .csv file via e-mail. This exported data allows for detailed quantitative analysis, facilitating better understanding of the relationship between lameness and herd health diseases (e.g. SARA, acidosis), climate conditions (seasons), and cow comfort (e.g. overstocking, barn design) for each farm deploying the application.
• The ability to import preprepared lists of animals to be trimmed - each farm can prepare these lists in advance (in either .csv or .xlsx format) and e-mail them to the trimmer. Such lists can be opened in iTrim as attachments directly from the Mail application. When such a list is not available, animal and farm details may be entered manually by the trimmer.
• A full database of possible diagnoses and treatments for each diagnostic area of the animal with high quality example pictures for each possible diagnosis. In the diagnosis view, tapping on any given diagnostic area will only display diagnoses relevant to that area of the animal, minimising the possibility of inaccurate diagnosis or record keeping.
• The ability to see the animal’s diagnostic history for each diagnostic area whilst carrying out a new diagnosis.
• The ability to input a custom treatment for situations in which the trimmer had to improvise an unusual solution, and take an accompanying photograph using the iPad’s built-in camera for illustration.