A Low-power, Reachable, Wearable and Intelligent IoT Device for Animal Activity Monitoring

Abstract

Along with the proliferation of mobile devices and wireless signal coverage, IoT devices, such as smart wristbands for monitoring its owner’s activity or sleep patterns, get great popularity. Wearable technology in human life has become quite useful due to the information given (sleep hours, heart rate, etc). However, wearables for animals does not give information about behaviour directly: they collect raw data that is sent to a server where, after a post-processing step, the behaviour is known. In this work, we present a smart IoT device that classifies different animal behaviours from the information obtained from on-board sensors using an embedded neural network running in the device. This information is uploaded to a server through a wireless sensor network based on Zigbee communication. The architecture of the device allows an easy assembly in a reduced dimension wearable case. The firmware allows a modular functionality by activating or deactivating modules independently, which improve the power efficiency of the device. The power consumption has been analyzed, allowing the 1Ah battery to work the system during several days. A novel localization and distance estimation technique (for 802.15.4 networks) is presented to recover a lost device in Donana National Park with unidirectional antennas and log-normalization distance estimation over RSSI.