discussion / Acoustics  / 2 February 2023

Commercially available connected audio sensors

Hi - can anyone advise if there is a commercially made passive audio recorder that can be powered by solar/battery and have 3g/4g connectivity - ideally with compression on the device - and will transfer the data on a regular basis - every 10 mins? We are developing a cloud platform to process vast amounts of audio data and experimenting with various ML and other models to identify species - starting with birds then moving onto other taxa. The results are published in a data lake for analysis. A charity is keen to deploy a sensor in a marsh where only very limited human visitors are allowed - and would like to understand whats living in there in almost real time. 




Hi!

I am not aware of any such connected loggers/recorders but they would be nice. 

The AudioMoths have been revolutionary in providing audologging at a low cost but they take a lot of "data muling" (carrying SD cards in and out of the field sites) and swapping of batteries.

Cheers,

 

Rainforest Connection's (RFCx) Guardian devices may be of interest. They are solar-powered and have connectivity options for Wifi, GSM and satellite transfer. They've previously been used for detecting e.g., gunshots or chainsaws (using edge computing) and then sending positive detections/alerts to folks on the ground. RFCx also hosts Arbimon, a free, no-code software platform that facilitates analysis of audio data as well. Happy to chat more if you'd like to talk further about it!